Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

Fiction • Essays • Journalism

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About the Author

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her fiction includes regional bestseller The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels. She has also published fiction and essays in books and anthologies, including Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement and Remembering Arthur Miller.

A former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Joanne has won awards for her nonfiction and published hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, including World Literature Today and international commentary in The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, GlobalPost, and others. READ FULL BIO

Time and Tides:

Joanne’s Blog

PEN Journey 12: Tolerance on the Horizon?

PEN International celebrates its Centenary in 2021. I have been active in PEN for more than 30 years in various positions, including as Vice President, International Secretary and Chair of International PEN’S Writers in Prison Committee. With memories stirring and file drawers bulging, I am a bit of a walking archive and have been asked by PEN International to write down memories. In digestible portions I will recount moments and hope this personal PEN journey may be of interest.

 

 

It was a time of hope, the year when Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk joined in free elections in South Africa, when Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres shook hands and began to live side by side, when the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defense Association laid down their arms after twenty-five years of terrorist conflict. The idea of tolerance quivered in the imagination in 1994 even if the realization of tolerant societies still seemed an imaginative leap…READ FULL POST