Events

Jorge Olivera Castillo is Brown University’s International Writers Project Fellow for 2017-18.  A well-known Cuban dissident writer and journalist,  Jorge, along with 75 other human rights defenders, trade union activists, opposition party members, journalists, writers, and librarians, was arrested in the 2003 Cuban government crackdown known as the “Black Spring.”  Sentenced to eighteen years for his pro-democracy writings and political activism, Jorge was held in solitary confinement in Guantanamo Prison from March, 2003, until December, 2004, when he was released on humanitarian grounds – though he remained a virtual prisoner on the island, permitted neither to work or to travel.  Along with his wife, women’s rights advocate Nancy Alfaya Hernández, Jorge was able to leave Cuba with the assistance of PEN UK and the Harvard University Scholars At Risk Program in 2016.  He is the author of eight volumes of fiction and poetry, as well as of journalism that has been published in Cuba, the U.S., Sweden, Argentina and the Czech Republic.

Jorge will be in residence at Brown throughout the 2017-18 academic year.  This event will provide the Literary Arts and Brown community with an opportunity to meet Jorge, hear him read from his work, and speak with him about his experiences.