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Alice Rothchild is an author, filmmaker, and physician focused on human rights and social justice. Her most recent book, Finding Melody Sullivan, is a young adult novel exploring grief and friendship in the setting of broader political questions raised by realities in Israel/Palestine.
Alice will discuss the history and politics of her own journey as a writer, how she got into writing a YA book, and why she chooses to focus on Palestine amidst a prevailing absence of the subject in Young Adult and Childrens’ literature. She will share reflections on why that is so, what happens to teachers and librarians who teach Palestine, and why this is important in a broader sense in terms of antiracist, anticolonial education.
Alice will also discuss the inspiration for her new young adult novel, Finding Melody Sullivan, that seeks to creatively address this issue, and offer a reading from the book.
About the Author:
Alice Rothchild, author, filmmaker, and physician, is focused on human rights and social justice. She developed an interest in progressive politics in the 1960s and 70s starting with campus opposition to the Vietnam War and moving on to her discovery of feminism and health reform movements while in medical school and residency. She contributed to the first edition of Our Bodies, Our Selves, joined women’s consciousness raising activities, and worked for health care reform on the grassroots level. Political analysis thus increasingly informed her understanding of the world. She also became active in a number of social justice organizations and began speaking and writing on topics ranging from childbirth to menopause to caring for underserved populations.
She is the author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience (Pluto Press, 2007, second edition 2010). In 2013 she released a documentary film, Voices Across the Divide which co-won the 2013 Audience Award at the Boston Palestine Film Festival. In 2014 Just World Books published her second book: On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion and in 2017 Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine. In 2023, Cune Press published her young adult novel, Finding Melody Sullivan and will publish her middle grade novel, Old Enough to Know, in December 2023. She is finishing a young adult graphic novel and a memoir in verse and has started her next project, researching the history of the homebirth movement in Seattle, WA.