Global Voices: Mia Kirshner’s I Live Here

Posted on: September 22, 2008 | Filed under: I Live Here | 0 Comments

Actress Mia Kirshner is probably best known for her role on the Showtime drama The L Word, but for the past several years, she’s been focusing her creative energies on the people that nobody seems to notice: women and children around the world who have been displaced, silenced and forgotten. Over the past few years, 33-year-old Kirshner has traveled to some of the most desolate and dangerous countries in the world to see and meet some of the most victimized people, in hopes of bringing the world’s attention to their plight.

One part of her commitment to bringing attention to the world of global refugees is I Live Here, an unusual collaborative graphic work that will be published by Pantheon in October. A mixed media combination of comics, photos, journals and travelogues, I Live Here is a four-segment book collection, with each section–—and each artist—focused on the personal and social trauma of displaced people in a different country. Much acclaimed comics journalist Joe Sacco, creator of Palestine, produces a graphic novel that examines war-torn Ingushetia, Chechnya; comics memoirist Phoebe Gloeckner examines the serial killing of women in Juarez, Mexico; French-Algerian artist Kamel Khélif surveys ethnic killing in Burma and Thailand; and finally, there’s a children’s story by author J.B. McKinnon and artist Julie Morstad that tackles the AIDS epidemic the African country of Malawi. Other writer-contributors include Chris Abani, nonfiction writer Karen Connelly and short story writer Lauren Kirschner.