College Life
An Interview with IOP Spring Fellow Rose Styron: The World is Her Office, Nature is Her Religion
By Anna Yeung
March 2009
Rose Styron's office still shows the signs of moving in: a door that has trouble opening, desks still gleaming and void of any urgent clutter, and a computer upon which Ms. Styron is learning to master the art of emailing.
"This is my first office," laughs the sunny, vibrant lady sitting across from me, a member of our new batch of Spring IOP fellows. The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard invites five inspiring individuals every semester to become Fellows at the Institute of Politics and lead study groups on their various fields of expertise. Ms. Styron's Tuesday study group is titled "Art & Politics: The Influence of Writers and other Artists on Civil and Human Rights and on Public Policy."
For a poet turned human rights activist, there can't be a more fitting theme. Born and raised in Baltimore, Ms. Styron graduated from Wellesley College before attending Johns Hopkins and then followed her passion into campaign work. She moved to Rome to write a book of poetry shortly after marrying her husband, the famous American author William Styron. Her husband's 1967 Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Confessions of Nat Turner, would inadvertently lead to her lifelong calling: human rights activism.
While accompanying her husband to the Soviet Union for an Afro-Asian writer's conference, Mrs. Styron bravely protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She was sent to a detention center as a result of taking this active stand. It was there that Ms. Styron formed steady bonds with fellow writers from all across the world who had also been prosecuted by the Soviets. They would later ask her to bring their manuscripts back to America to be translated and published.
Forever changed by her experiences in the Soviet Union, Ms. Styron joined the first American branch of Amnesty International. She became their American delegate on their first international convention in Paris and began publishing articles on torture. Later, Ms. Styron was sent to Chile during the reign of Pinochet to gather information during those dangerous times.
"The human rights movement was just beginning then," Ms. Styron notes about her previous adventures across the globe with numerous activist groups. When asked what human rights issue she believes the current Obama administration should tackle, Ms. Styron, who campaigned for Obama in Ohio, expressed her faith in Obama and her trust that he will pay attention to human rights issues. Regarding his inaugural speech, which Ms. Styron attended, "[e]verything he said about equality and justice resonated."
This globetrotting extraordinaire chose to settle down this semester in Cambridge and assume the position of an IOP Fellow in order to reconnect with the world of art and public policy, both of which she cares immensely about. Ms. Styron has a rich program of artists and writers who have both influenced and drawn from the human rights movements lined up as guest speakers for her study group. She hopes that concentrating on the journey of each of her invited guests and leading discussions around them will inadvertently lead her study group towards learning something about ways to get involved with building a better world.
When asked for a sentence of wisdom to impart on young women today, Ms. Styron had this to offer:
"Keep all your options open, keep your eyes and heart open, travel wherever, whenever you can, come back home and record it."
