: About Me

Robin Finesmith holds a B.A. in English from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. A native of Madison, Wisconsin, she fell in love with public radio at 19, when she was home from college at a summer job, listening to the radio while prepping salad bar vegetables at a local deli.

After college, she worked at Wisconsin Public Radio and NPR affiliate WSUI in Iowa City as a public affairs producer and classical music host. During the mid-90s, she served as Midwest Bureau Chief of NPR's environmental newsmagazine, "Living on Earth," writing about urban sprawl and other environmental issues affecting the Great Lakes.

Robin now lives in Chicago, where has she written about the environment, historic preservation, and the arts. She has also taught creative writing and writing for broadcast in Chicago and elsewhere.

She is a great fan of the Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Illinois (and the Swedish pancakes featured at the nearby Stockholm Inn). Happiest accomplishment this month: finding that her 16-year-old nephew still likes to thumb-wrestle.

WHY I'M WRITING ABOUT DARFUR:

In the spring of 2005, I came across a picture: a small human skeleton, arms stretched over its head and its wrists bound together; the photo accompanied one of Nicholas Kristof's Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columns about Darfur.

A few days later, on a cool afternoon in the suburbs, I drove a few miles over to the home of Martha Cook, who had also seen Kristof's column, and was selling yard signs and green bracelets that said "Not on Our Watch" to raise money for humanitarian aid.

On her front grassy lawn, I found myself sitting next to a young man named Brian Burns, a janitor at the local high school working his way through college, who had recently returned from a volunteer trip to Darfur. He handed me a grayish-brown piece of metal: a strip of iron, maybe a pound or two in my palm, cool to the touch.

He told me it was a leftover piece of shrapnel, blasted from a Sudanese helicopter gunship in Darfur with the intent not just to kill, but to intentionally maim the people in a village below. This piece of iron had traveled westward from Sudan to Arlington Heights, Illinois. I was holding Darfur in my hands.

ADDITIONAL INFO:

Brian Burns accidentally met history teacher and documentarian Bruce Janu while working late one night at John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights. Janu later produced an award-winning documentary called "Facing Sudan," which tells Brian's story, along with those of other ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to confront the genocide in Darfur.

Please do visit the "Facing Sudan" website to see clips from the film, which also includes "Crayons and Paper," a heart-breaking segment featuring drawings by Darfur children, who documented in crayon the destruction of their villages and the murder of their families.

The drawings were smuggled out of Sudan by a pediatrician working with Doctors Without Borders.

http://www.bellbookcamera.com/sudan_clips.html
http://www.facingsudan.com/sudan.html

Human Rights Watch also collected similar drawings by Darfur children, which can be viewed at: http://www.hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/

Politics, News & Issues > Pulitzer Center Why has international intervention to stop the fighting in Darfur failed, and what policy alternatives might succeed?

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The question itself, sadly, is part of the problem. "The fighting" in Darfur amounts to genocide. We have to get the words right. Else, we hamstring our conscience, and bind our own hands. There are three well-documented issues that have crippled international intervention. and deeper, uglier reasons, too. A chief unspoken truth is this: world leaders fear that any meaningful involvement in Darfur *could become* policy. And so these obstacles, though admittedly complex, remain not only reasons for failure, but excuses for inaction. #1: SUDANESE GOVERNMENT OBSTRUCTION: *Initial refusal to a...

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• 1Citizen Journalism Awards