JORDAN STEVEN SHER
Member, The Working Group for Bosnia and Herzegovina
Member, Expert International Team Council for the Research of Genocide Canada (IGC)
Volunteer, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
Education and Public Policy Committees
A former social worker and middle school teacher, I have always been an advocate for social justice. I happened upon the topic of the 1990s war in Bosnia while interviewing two women for my first book who were children in 1992, and who, along with their families, suffered the trauma that befell all who were targeted by the ultranationalist Serb genocidal campaign, with rhetoric that continues even in today's Bosnia. Both books can be found in the tabs above.
I have accumulated interviews with survivors of the war in Bosnia, and reflections written by young adults about their experiences growing up with parents who survived. I have been considering many options to present their stories, and have landed on publishing them in a book. These harrowing, heart-wrenching, and poignant stories well-depict the trauma of war, and the challenging goal of overcoming the residual effects. My goal is to publish this in early 2024.
I am nearing completion of an historical fiction work about how one boy escaped the transport to a death camp in Croatia during World War II, and joined Tito's Partisans at the age of twelve. Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew in Sarajevo until his death in October, 2022, was forced into hiding in the mountains until discovered by Partisans, with whom he fought the Germans and their collaborators until Germany's capitulation in May, 1945
Lastly, testing out my poetry chops,
I was selected to have my poem, "Fade to Orange, to Gray, to Black" in the anthology,
DEAR HUMAN AT THE EDGE OF TIME:
Poems on Climate Change in the US
You can read it in the "Other Works" section. I'll be reading the poem along with others from the book in the San Francisco Bay Area in the coming months.
Please check out the other sections to gain more insight into who I am and what I write about.
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