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When Moore, a writer and independent publisher, brought her experience in the American cultural underground to Cambodia on the cusp of the global economic meltdown, she intended to share a skill that would allow young people the opportunity to archive their own stories. Instead, the second generation of Khmer Rouge survivors she worked with ended up rewriting history. The Cambodian Chbap Srei is a 17th-century book that intended to establish a code of conduct for young women. Staunchly traditional, but repressive and frustrating, the first large group of young women in Cambodia decide to rewrite it with Moore. The year-long process culminates in a grand discussion of human rights and gender equity, and a hand-bound book for all participants. Tragically, the completed book was banned and censored in both Cambodia and the U.S. But what these bold young women learn next about when they are allowed to speak, and to whom, is chilling.
About the author
Award-winning journalist and bestselling comics anthologist Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, SD and grew up in St. Paul, MN. Currently in Chicago, she is the author of Unmarketable from the New Press (Best Book, Mother Jones) and a series of memoirs from Cantankerous Titles including New Girl Law and Cambodian Grrrl (Best Book, Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award). She is the former editor of Punk Planet, The Comics Journal, and the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin. Her cultural criticism has appeared in the Baffler, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, Tin House, Salon, TPM, Truthout, and Al Jazeera. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, the ChicagoReader, and many others, and she has appeared on CNN, WTTW, WBEZ, WNUR, Radio Australia, and Voice of America. She is a Fulbright scholar and the recipient of a USC Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship and an Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellowship at the Newberry Library. She has two cats and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
