About Nancy Kurshan, author of Out of Control: A 15-Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons
Nancy Kurshan is an American activist who participated in the civil rights and peace movements as far back as high school. In college she was a member of Friends of SNCC and CORE, and participated in the first demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC in April 1965. She worked with Jerry Rubin for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and confounded the Youth International Party (Yippies).
Kurshan initiated a guerrilla theater women’s group called W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) along with Robin Morgan, Sharon Krebs, and Roz Payne. They put a hex on HUAC and Wall Street.
In 1970 Kurshan traveled to North Vietnam on a women’s solidarity trip and returned in 2013 to attend a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords.
She has participated for many years in campaigns to free political prisoners, such as the Puerto Rican political prisoners, Sundiata Acoli, Geronimo Pratt, and many others. She was active in the fight against control unit prisons as a founding member of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, described in her book. She has also written a widely distributed article on “Women And Imprisonment in the United States” (below).
Out of Control: A 15-Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons (2013)
Some of her articles:
Women And Imprisonment in the United States, 1995
“From Mandela to Oscar Lopez – America’s Own Political Prisoners”, Counterpunch, December 2013
“Connecting the Dots: From Tiger Cages to Control Units”, Counterpunch, November 2013
“Houses of the Dead: Human Rights Crimes Inside America’s Control Unit Prisons”, Counterpunch, May 2013
Four short interviews on Solitary Confinement with Nancy Kurshan by Claire Schoen for Making Contact, 2013
“Solitary Resistance”, Counterpunch, 2013
“The way forward to end solitary confinement torture: Where’s the Army?”, Todd Ashker comments on Out of Control: A 15-Year Struggle to End Control Unit Prisons in the San Francisco Bayview, January 25, 2015
The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, edited by Karin Aguilar-San Juan and Frank Joyce.
