Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Human Rights
Episode: Shanee Stepakoff, "Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone" (Bucknell UP, 2021)
Description: Content note: This episode contains discussions of violence, including rape and mutilationDerived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 202) is a remarkable poetry collection, which won the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award (gold, poetry category), aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Testimony finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra...