•Foreword by Tobe Levin von Gleichen, CEO and Founder, UnCUT/VOICES
Press, publishing books against FGM and endorsement by Annie
Lamott.
• ARC/galley mailings and personalized pitching and follow up to
book review editors at publishing industry trade magazines like
Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, etc., and book
reviewers at select print magazines targeted toward women interest,
world news, health, and feminism: More Magazine, Mother Jones,
Women’s Health, and Ms. Magazine, among others.
• Pitches to book review editors at feminist journals and
quarterlies, like Women’s Review of Books, Herizons, Feminist
Review, Feminist Studies.
• Outreach to non-profit organizations working to ban FMG, for
potential resource inclusion, and co-promotion TBD: 28 Too Many,
Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation, VDAY, among others.
• Targeted media research and pitch development for a comprehensive
short lead media publicity plan, which would include review copy
and press material mailings to news editors, women’s interest
editors, and book review editors, radio producers and bloggers, at
select online magazines, news websites, blogs and radio shows for
potential review, excerpt, or author-interview in July 2017.
• Book events in the SF Bay Area area to coincide with pub month.
Jeanie Kortum is an award-winning author, journalist, and
humanitarian. She founded and directed A Home Away from
Homelessness for nearly twenty years. Her philanthropic work has
been widely recognized by a long list of awards, some of which
include the San Francisco Foundation’s Community Award, the
Commission on Women Making History Award, the Espiritu Award from
the Isabel Allende Foundation and a Lifetime Achievement Award from
the San Francisco Urban Research Association. She has been the
subject of two CBS national news profiles and rights to her life
story have been sold to Warner Brothers.
Kortum’s award winning first novel, Ghost Vision, is loosely based
on her experiences dogsledding to a Greenland village at the top of
the world. She researched Stones by living with a hunter/gatherer
tribe in Africa, during which time she witnessed a clitoridectomy.
This experience compelled her to bring awareness to the danger of
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Kortum lives with her husband and adopted son in Northern
California and Ireland.
2018 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Winner in General
Fiction/Novel (Over 80,000 words)
“Everything Jeanie Kortum writes (and does!) is informed by a huge
heart, a gentle and tenacious intelligence, a fierce longing to
tell truth stories, a passionate dedication to the betterment of
humanity. She is a wonderful writer.”
—Anne Lamott
“Not since Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy has a novel
so boldly placed female genital mutilation at its heart. Stones
does not turn away but looks directly at this ancient rite,
encompassing and also challenging modernity's response to it.
Stones is as rewarding as it is provocative.”
—Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center
for African and African American Research, Harvard University
“As a survivor of female genital mutilation, I welcome the complex
tale Jeanie Kortum has spun in Stones. On so many levels, her
fiction tells the truth about a custom whose psychological density
and convolution escape the rigid categories of sociology and
statistics. In their place we find spirituality, tribal identity,
myth, mysticism, and art—beliefs that anchor FGM in defiant
emotions that must be uncovered and addressed in order that we
activists will sooner see the end of a noxious tradition.”
—Khady Koita, author of Mutilée, translated as Blood Stains
“Appeals to human rights go only so far; statistical analyses,
medical persuasion, and lofty sermons cannot address the roots of
FGM (Female Genital Mutilation). Only stories like Kortum’s Stones
do, with its intricate heights and depths, emotions, inventions,
and insight.”
—Dr. Tobe Levin von Gleichen, Associate, Harvard University,
Visiting Research Fellow, University of Oxford, CEO,
UnCUT/VOICES
"Jeanie Kortum is a storyteller in the ancient tradition that she
writes of: at once poet, dreamweaver, detective, medicine woman,
and visionary. Each sentence of Stones is a work of art, each word
a surprise and at the same time deeply remembered from an
indigenous past buried in our cells. An epic poem, a healing spell,
an ancient incantation and a page-turner novel, the reader may
emerge as changed and awakened as the characters and cultures in
these pages."
—Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of
Words and founder of the S.H.E. Fund
“At the heart of Stones is a harsh tradition, female genital
mutilation that tethers its tribal actors to the Kenyan earth, the
cradle of humanity. Tradition encroaches upon modernity as the
young anthropologist intent on scientific investigation assumes the
role of a messianic heroine . . . Carried by the soundscape of
Kortum’s story, readers search for origins, struggle with change,
chafe against inevitability. They are also granted the opportunity
to loosen the chains of conflicted complicity through the authority
of an extraordinary language.”
—Dr. Maria Jaschok Director, International Gender Studies Centre,
Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford
“Reading Stones made my mind sweat, like listening to poignant
music can do. Partly this is because of its tasty flavorful words,
which exceed what we call 'poetry'. And partly it is because in the
protagonist Emely/Amely, one experiences a human being turning into
a divinity."
—Shao John Thorpe, author of The Cargo Cult
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