MOUNT VERNON — A Chicago woman who has spent a decade leading delegations to Iraq, taking food and supplies in violation of U.S. law and U.N. sanctions, will speak at Cornell College on “The Further Invention of Nonviolence” at 11 a.m. Friday, Feb. 17, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.
Kathy Kelly is a Chicago teacher who has been jailed, fined and honored for her actions to promote peace and nonviolence. Founder of Voices in the Wilderness and Voices for Creative Nonviolence, she has made 22 trips to Iraq since 1996. Her 2005 book, “Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison,” recounts her time in Iraq from the first Gulf War of 1991, through 12 years of economic sanctions, to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that began in 2003.
Her most recent project is the Winter of Our Discontent, a new campaign to challenge U.S. military and economic warfare against Iraq.
In 1988 Kelly was sentenced to a year in prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites; she served nine months. In 2004 she served three months in a federal prison for her nonviolent resistance at Fort Benning, Ga., home to the School of the Americas, an Army military combat training school. She has helped organize and participated in nonviolent direct action teams in Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq, and she was among the first internationals to visit the Jenin camp in the Occupied West Bank. She is a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and has received awards nationwide for her work, including the 2004 Cranbrook Peace Foundation Annual Peace Award, the Houston Peace and Justice Center National Peacemaker Award and the 2005 Peace Seeker of the Year honor from the Montana Peace Seekers Network.
