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Project Partner Spotlight:
Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA)
by Liz Field, CTA Communications Manager
Eleven years ago the Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA) welcomed its first writer-in-residence to Ithaca, Yi Ping, a poet and essayist from China. As a young adult he participated in the Students' Democracy Movement and was permanently banned from working in education and forbidden to publish his work. In 1991 he fled to Poland, and in 1997, he was granted political asylum by the U.S. In 2001 Yi Ping moved to Ithaca, where he taught Chinese at Cornell University and worked with students in the writing program at Ithaca College. Since the end of his residency with ICOA in 2003, Yi Ping has stayed in Ithaca with his wife and son; he currently works as an editor at Human Rights in China.
The Ithaca City of Asylum has been a Project Partner with CTA for eleven years, providing sanctuary to writers whose works are suppressed, whose lives are threatened, whose cultures are vanishing, or whose languages are endangered. The other writers-in-residence have been playwright and novelist Reza Daneshvar from Iran (2004), poet and memoirist Sarah Mkhonza from Swaziland (2006), and poet and playwright Irakli Kakabadze from Georgia (2008). Writers are chosen based on their writing, their political activism and their need for asylum. While in residence in Ithaca, ICOA assists them with their daily expenses, including housing, furnishings, transportation, translators' fees, and the performance and publication of new work. ICOA's first four resident writers were hosted for two years by Cornell University, which provided a stipend, full employee benefits, and visa sponsorship.
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Sonali Samarasinghe
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Their fifth writer-in-residence, Sonali Samarasinghe, is an award-winning investigative journalist, editor and lawyer from Sri Lanka. She worked for more than twenty years fighting for justice, freedom and accountability in her country. Shortly after government-sponsored assassins murdered her husband and well-known editor, Lasantha Wickrematunge, on January 8, 2009, Samarasinghe was driven from her country by threats to her own life, as well as her family.
Samarasinghe was the editor-in-chief of the Morning Leader, a mid week national newspaper, and the consultant editor of The Sunday Leader. She has been nationally and internationally recognized for her work and given several awards, including being honored as one of ten international human rights defenders by Amnesty International and numerous journalism awards, including the Award for Print and Digital Journalism by the organization Images of Voice and Hope, after the launch of her website LankaStandard.com. She created the website in May 2011, and it quickly gained credibility as a reliable and balanced news source, even as it continues to fight for justice and accountability in her country.
Read the whole article here.
For more information, go to the ICOA blog.
To learn more about the issues in Sri Lanka, visit Sonali's website LankaStandard.com.
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The Center for Transformative Action (CTA) helps to create communities that work for everyone. We do this by providing fiscal sponsorship to innovative social change agents in New York State, as well as financial, human resources, and grants management services. CTA is an educational non-profit organization affiliated with Cornell University.
