LOCATION: Maiahaus Project Space, 402 E. Mifflin Street, Madison, WI
In 2016, “13th” became the first documentary to open the New York Film Festival. The title refers to the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the film examines the large, exploitable loophole contained therein.
Directed by Ava DuVernay, the film begins with an eye-opening journey into how the prison industrial complex affects people of color with an alarming statistic: One out of four African-American males will serve prison time at one point in their lives.
Hosting the screening and moderating the post-viewing discussion on Friday, October 12, 2018, 7pm are two renowned scholars, authors and activists, Lisa Graves and Amy Quan Barry.
Amy Quan Barry is a professor and the director of the UW-Madison MFA program in Creative Writing. She is the author of four books of poetry and the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, and her work has appeared in such journals as Ms. and The New Yorker. In 2012, Barry was invited to participate in a U.S. State Department sponsored author exchange in Southeast Asia, and traveled under the aegis of the State Department to Vietnam and Cambodia on a ten-day exchange designed to spark conversation among artists regarding literature and artistic freedom.
Lisa Graves, who actually appears in “13th,” is a co-founder of Documented, an investigative body focused on corporate influence on democracy. She is the former chief counsel for nominations for the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, and former executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Graves writes for numerous publications and has recently appeared as a consultant on news outlets such as The Rachel Maddow Show and The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.