Anne K. Ream – Founder of The Voices and Faces Project and author of Lived Through This

Anne K. Ream is an author, activist and founder of The Voices and Faces Project, an award-winning global storytelling project. 

Ream is the author of “Lived Through This,” a literary and photographic memoir of her multi-country journey spent documenting the stories of gender-based violence survivors, a book which has been called “heart-stopping and beautifully rendered,” (Eve Ensler) and was adapted for the theatre under the direction of 16th Street Theater’s Ann Filmer, and the co-creator – with novelist and Yale University creative writing instructor R. Clifton Spargo – of The Stories We Tell, The Voices and Faces Project’s global testimonial writing program for survivors of gender-based violence.

Over the last decade their immersive, two-day reading and writing focused program has traveled across the North American and African continents and trained over 1,200 writers and activists. The results have been nothing short of extraordinary: workshop alums have used their stories to lobby at statehouses (and pass new laws) across the country and on Capitol Hill; published essays, opinion pieces and op eds in a long list of major media outlets; published books with major presses (Linda Kay Klein’s “Pure” and Christa Desir’s “FaultLine,” and created public performances in partnership with Chicago’s theatrical community, perhaps most notably through the “Louder Together” crowdsourced video poetry project The Voices and Faces Project launched in 2021. Ten years after doing their first testimonial writing workshop at the Chicago Cultural Center, The Voices and Faces has expanded its programming to reach returning citizens (in partnership with Illinois Humanities), court-involved girls, refugee women, and migrant farmworkers. A former Leo Burnett USA Group Creative Director and occasional New City music reviewer, Ream is also co-producing a benefit record, “Sing Truth to Power,” that will support the organization’s writing workshop scholarship fund. Up next for Ream: a creative residency at Centre Pompadour in France, and the December 2022 launch of the Chicago-based Center for Story & Witness, where Ream, Spargo and human rights journalist Jimmie Briggs will expand and scale The Voices and Faces Project programming, training a new generation of workshop facilitator/instructor teams. “The stories we tell allow us to make sense of the world, and to define our place in the world,” says Anne. “But they are also our most powerful tools for challenging and changing the world. Narrative is inherently active, not passive. When it is good it unsettles us – and it makes demands. Creating a space to help people develop change-focused narrative, during a cultural moment when change is so absolutely vital, is moving to me. And it makes me hopeful.”