Conversation with the Author
– James Baldwin
Gather online with our virtual community for engaging presentations and discussions featuring authors and titles fundamental to the study of human rights.
All sessions in the Conversation with the Author series are FREE. Registration is required to access each session. Zoom information will be sent via email to all registrants. If you are not able to attend the session live, a link to the recorded session will be sent to all registrants and upon request.
Jessica Herthel, Author
I am Jazz
Based on the real life experiences of Jazz Jennings, a transgender YouTube personality, Human Rights Campaign Youth Ambassador and TLC star.
Wednesday January 12, 2022
4:00pm MT / 6:00pm ET
“This is an essential tool for parents and teachers to share with children whether those kids identify as trans or not. I wish I had had a book like this when I was a kid struggling with gender identity questions. I found it deeply moving in its simplicity and honesty.”—Laverne Cox (who plays Sophia in “Orange Is the New Black”)
From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn’t feel like herself in boys’ clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way. Jazz’s story is based on her real-life experience and she tells it in a simple, clear way that will be appreciated by picture book readers, their parents, and teachers.
Ordering your book from Amazon? Consider AmazonSmile and designate the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights as your favorite charitable organization.
SPECIAL PROGRAM
INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
January 27th, 2022
Cara Wilson-Granat began conversations with Otto Frank through letters during the tumultuous decades of the 1960’s and 70’s. His responses helped her as she matured into a loving, trusting woman as he became Cara’s mentor and wise “grandfather.” Cara’s correspondence with Otto culminated in a memorable meeting shortly before his death, the impact of which continues to influence her life even today.
Ordering your book from Amazon? Consider AmazonSmile and designate the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights as your favorite charitable organization.
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COMING SOON
Joel Poremba
Author, My Name is Staszek Surdel
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
11:30am MT / 1:30pm ET
The improbable true story of a nine-year-old Polish boy’s Holocaust survival.
This biography traces the Holocaust through the eyes of young Nathan Poremba and examines the difficult emotional and physical choices he had to make to survive. His father was murdered by the Nazis before his hometown went under deportation orders, so he made the heart-wrenching decision to flee his home in Southern Poland (Wieliczka) and leave his mother and sisters behind.
Ordering your book from Amazon? Consider AmazonSmile and designate the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights as your favorite charitable organization.
Past Sessions
2021 Conversations
10/27/2021 - Glenn Kurtz, author of Three Minutes in Poland
Glenn Kurtz, Author
Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film
Commemorating the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht
Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, Glenn’s grandfather, David Kurtz, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16mm Kodachrome color film.
More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community—an entire culture—annihilated in the Holocaust
Ordering your book from Amazon? Consider AmazonSmile and designate the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights as your favorite charitable organization.
7/6/2021 - Andrea Vogt , author of Common Courage: Bill Wassmuth, Human Rights, and Small-Town Activism
Andrea Vogt, author of Common Courage:
Bill Wassmuth, Human Rights, and Small-Town Activism
A thoughtful book about the importance of speaking out on behalf of human rights, Common Courage grew out of the last public interviews with noted Northwest human rights activist and former Catholic priest Bill Wassmuth. Author Andrea Vogt chronicles Wassmuth’s fascinating life story – from Idaho farm boy to nationally known human rights activist.
Ordering your book from Amazon? Consider AmazonSmile and designate the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights as your favorite charitable organization.
“Vogt’s final interviews with Wassmuth in his last year of life and struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease movingly reveal a man of deep faith and character, as do her descriptions of his unwavering belief in the role of grassroots human rights efforts. Wassmuth once said, ‘faith communities exist to be a leaven in a larger community.’ Vogt demonstrates not only how inextricably linked Bill Wassmuth’s life was with Idaho, but how he acted as leaven in the Northwest’s fight against white supremacy and, for that matter, the fight against hate across the U.S.”
— Gail J. Stearns, director, The Common Ministry at WSU, and adjunct faculty member in WSUs Honors College and Department of Women’s Studies
5/4/2021 - Alan Gratz, author of REFUGEE
Alan Gratz, author of REFUGEE
Three different kids.
One mission in common: ESCAPE.
Josef is a Jewish boy in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world…
Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety and freedom in America…
Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe…
All three young people will go on harrowing journeys in search of refuge. All will face unimaginable dangers–from drownings to bombings to betrayals. But for each of them, there is always the hope of tomorrow. And although Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud are separated by continents and decades, surprising connections will tie their stories together in the end.
Ordering your book from Amazon? Consider AmazonSmile and designate the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights as your favorite charitable organization.
“With urgent, clear-eyed storytelling, Gratz’s Refugee compellingly explores the desperation and strength that unites those struggling for a place to call home.”
—Eliot Schrefer, two-time National Book Award finalist
3/26/2021 - Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Café
Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Café
As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century’s most monumental events—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten?
Ordering your book from Amazon? Consider AmazonSmile and designate the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights as your favorite charitable organization.
“Survivor Café…feels like the book Rosner was born to write. Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart…. Her words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants across the globe, can help us build a more humane world.” —San Francisco Chronicle