October 11, 2011 is election day in Liberia. 16 candidates are on the presidential ballot including Liberia’s current president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf who was elected after a brutal civil war. What will this year’s elections mean for Liberia in which women took the lead in bringing peace to the nation?
Emira Woods
Community Cinema [DC] is happy to welcome back our good friend
Emira Woods from the
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) to lead our discussion after “
WOMEN, WAR & PEACE: Pray the Devil Back To Hell”
October 18 at the Washington, DC Jewish Community Center; and
October 25 at Busboys and Poets. IPS is a community partner for the DC presentations of “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.”
About Emira Woods:
Emira Woods is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, and an expert on U.S. foreign policy with a special emphasis on Africa and the developing world. She has written on a range of issues from debt, trade and development to U.S. military policy. Woods serves on the Board of Directors of Africa Action, Just Associates, Global Justice and the Financial Policy Forum. She is also on the Network Council of Jubilee USA.
Emira completed her undergraduate studies at Columbia University and her graduate studies at Harvard. Prior to joining IPS, she was program manager for the Committee on Development Policy and Practice at InterAction, serving as a principal staff contact for advocacy at the UN, the international financial institutions, USAID and Treasury. Previous to that, she served as a program officer of Oxfam America’s Africa program.
Woods is a regular commentator on CNN’s “Your World Today,” BBC’s “The World Today” (Weekend), and appears regularly on Al Jazeera and Voice of America. She has hosted a WashingtonPost.com online chat and has published pieces in BBC’s
Focus on Africa magazine, NAACP’s
Crisis magazine as well as the
Miami Herald, the
Christian Science Monitor,
New York Newsday, the
Nation, the
Baltimore Sun, and the
Rochester Democrat and
Chronicle, among many others.
Woods is chair of the Board of Africa Action and serves on the advisory committee of the Zimbabwe Alliance as well as the Humanity United/Trustafrica Liberia program. She is also on the Board of Directors of Global Justice and is a member of the Network Council of Jubilee USA.
Emira Woods will be joined by
Carl Patrick Burrowes, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Communications and Humanities at Penn State, Harrisburg. Dr. Burrowes came to the Penn State Harrisburg faculty in Fall 2006 with decades of teaching and writing experience, including three years as chairperson of the Communication Studies Department at Morgan State. From 1995 to 1998, he was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Marshall University, where he co-founded the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division.
Burrowes is the author of
Power and Press Freedom in Liberia, 1830 to 1970 (Trenton, N. J.: African World Press: 2004), and co-author,
The Historical Dictionary of Liberia (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2001). Burrowes has also published commentaries, articles and other writings in a variety of media, including
The New York Times, the
Philadelphia Inquirer and the
Milwaukee Journal, as well as
Crisis,
Essence and
Emerge magazines.
FREE preview screenings of WOMEN, WAR & PEACE – Pray the Devil Back to Hell in Washington, DC:
Sunday, October 18 at 3 PM, Washington DC Jewish Community Center- Reservations
Sunday, October 25 at 5 PM, Busboys and Poets – Reservations
