Voice of Witness

Voice of Witness illuminates contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and around the world. Its founders are author Dave Eggers, physician Lola Vollen and writer/educator Mimi Lok.

Voice of Witness began life in 2004 as a book imprint of McSweeney’s Publishing. The imprint was created by Eggers and Vollen to depict human rights injustices through the stories of the people who experience them. In 2008 Mimi Lok came on board as Executive Director and transitioned the imprint to an award-winning non-profit, expanding the organization to include an education program that connects educators, students, and invested communities with these stories and issues through oral history-based curricula, training, and holistic educational support.

VOW Book Series: VOW has so far published fourteen titles in its series. We publish an average of two oral history titles each year, with our fifteenth and sixteenth books, Lavil and Chasing the Harvest, to be released in May 2017. To date, our series has covered a wide variety of social justice issues, ranging from post-9/11 civil rights and the criminal justice system to the experiences of men and women living under oppressive regimes in Burma, Zimbabwe and Colombia.

VOW Education Program: Our education team offers year-round site visits and workshops for schools and community organizations, a summer intensive oral history training called Amplifying Unheard Voices, and common core aligned curriculum through our website and publication The Power of the Story: The Voice of Witness Teacher’s Guide to Oral History. Over the past year, we reached over 20,000 high school to graduate level students.