GUANTÁNAMO TURNS TWENTY: Mansoor Adayfi, Antonio Aiello, Patricia Bronte, Marc Falkoff, & Alta Price

Описание: This month marks two decades since the opening of Guantánamo, where 39 men are still being detained indefinitely. Join us on Monday, January 10, to remember what happened there, acknowledge what is still happening, and discuss how we might change history.

While at Guantánamo, writer, advocate, and former detainee Mansoor Adayfi wrote a series of manuscripts he sent as letters to his attorneys, which he then transformed into this vital chronicle in collaboration with award-winning writer Antonio Aiello. Don't Forget Us Here tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world's most notorious prison, and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. With unexpected warmth and empathy, Adayfi unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit. And through his own story, he also tells Guantánamo's story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth and the people—detainees and guards alike—who lived there with him. Twenty years after 9/11, Guantánamo remains open, and at a moment of due reckoning, Adayfi helps us understand what actually happened there—a stunning record of an experience we cannot afford to forget. Adayfi and Aiello are joined in conversation by Chicago-based lawyers Patricia Bronte and Marc Falkoff, introduced by Alta L. Price.

Mansoor Adayfi is a writer, advocate, and former Guantánamo detainee, held for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. Adayfi was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggles to make a new life for himself and to shed the designation of a suspected terrorist. He has published several New York Times pieces, including a “Modern Love” column. He contributed to the graphic anthology Guantanamo Voices and the scholarly volume Witnessing Torture. He participated in the creation of the award-winning radio documentary “The Art of Now: Guantánamo” for BBC radio and the CBC podcast Love Me, which aired on Radiolab. In 2019, Adayfi won the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism. He is also one of the Sundance Institute’s 2020 Episodic TV Lab Fellows, through which he is working to bring Don’t Forget Us Here to television.

Antonio Aiello is a writer, editor, and storyteller, formerly the Content and Web Director at PEN America. He worked closely with Mansoor to develop the manuscripts written at Guantánamo into Don’t Forget Us Here. Together, they are working to develop a TV show inspired by the book as Fellows in the Sundance Institute’s prestigious Episodic TV Lab.

Patricia Bronte began representing men detained without charge at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in 2005, and she traveled to the prison there over two dozen times to meet with her clients. For ten years Ms. Bronte litigated civil rights and employment discrimination cases with the Chicago law firm Stowell & Friedman, Ltd. During the prior 20 years, she was a partner and associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago. Ms. Bronte also plays violin in the Chicago Bar Association Symphony Orchestra and numerous chamber music ensembles. She graduated cum laude from the Northwestern University School of Law in 1987.

Marc Falkoff is a law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, where he teaches courses in Criminal Law and Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Civil Rights. Since 2004, he has represented a number of prisoners being held by the U.S. military at Guantánamo Bay on suspicion of involvement with terrorism. The book of prisoner poetry he edited – Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak – was a bestselling anthology, and has been translated into a dozen languages.

Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Her translation of Juli Zeh’s New Year (World Editions, 2021) is on the longlist for the PEN Translation Prize, and her translation of Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti is forthcoming (Astra House, 2022).