About Robin Kirk
An award-winning author and human rights activist, Robin Kirk teaches at Duke University and coordinates the Duke Human Rights Initiative. She is the author of three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (PublicAffairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She is the coeditor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and helps edit Duke University Press’s Reader series.
Kirk won the 2005 Glamour magazine non-fiction contest with her essay on the death penalty, available in the November 2005 issue. She frequently speaks and writes about Latin America, human rights and U.S. policy in the media. Kirk also works as an investigator on capital cases in North Carolina. In the Fall of 2006, she was a Fulbright lecturer at the Human Rights Center at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. Kirk authored, co-authored and edited over twelve reports for Human Rights Watch, all available on-line.
In the 1980s, Kirk reported for U.S. media from Peru, where she covered the war between the government and the Shining Path. During that time, she also prepared reports for the U.S. Committee on Refugees, including the first report ever on the plight of Peru’s internally displaced people. The Decade of Chaqwa was followed by a second report, To Build Anew, dealing with the effort of some displaced families to return to their homes. Kirk also authored the first report chronicling the plight of the forcibly displaced in Colombia, Feeding the Tiger.
Kirk is a former Radcliffe Bunting Fellow and is a past winner of the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award for Freelance Writing.
