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Scribes for Human Rights

The Human Rights Program and the Creative Writing Program inaugurated the "Scribes for Human Rights" fellowship in January 2006. The fellowship supports a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) student to work with the Human Rights Program as a writer-in-residence. The Scribe learns the issues and meets the players involved in the Program’s public human rights work, then uses this experience to write an article for publication for a large audience. It is our hope that the fellowship will also inspire its writers to pursue other human rights themes in their future work.

It is expected that the Scribe’s relationship with the Human Rights Program will present an urgent and profound set of circumstances to engage the creative talents of selected MFA students, including writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry who will transmit the deeply individual faces of human rights abuses and vulnerabilities to a broader audience. "Reports" alone do not serve the Program’s needs; Scribes will focus on a narrative and write for a broader citizen-audience would greatly enhance the efforts of the Human Rights Program to get our message out to the community and the world.