ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Si Kahn has worked for forty-five years as a civil rights, labor, and community organizer and musician. He began his social justice career in 1965 with SNCC, the student wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. During the 1970s, he worked with the United Mine Workers of America on the Brookside Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union on the J. P. Stevens campaign. In 1980, he founded Grassroots Leadership, a southern-based national organization that works to abolish for-profit private prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers, as a step towards establishing a system of justice that is truly just and humane.
Si has previously written two organizing handbooks, How People Get Power and Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders, plus The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, coauthored with feminist/public philosopher Elizabeth Minnich, his long-time partner and spouse.
A songwriter and performing artist as well as an organizer, Si has released fifteen albums of his original songs, plus a collection of traditional labor, civil rights, and women’s songs with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp. His songs of family, community, work, and freedom have been recorded by hundreds of artists and translated into half a dozen languages, including French, Welsh, Hebrew, Swedish, Drents (a Dutch dialect), and Plattdeutsch (Low German). Si has performed at concerts and festivals in Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Northern Ireland, Canada, and the U.S. He is an active member of Local 1000 of the American Federation of Musicians, and is the official poet laureate of the North Carolina AFL-CIO by unanimous vote of the convention in 1986.
Si is also a composer, lyricist, and book writer for musical theater, with productions and readings at the Goodspeed Opera House’s Norma Terris Theatre; the Berkeley, Milwaukee and Tennessee Repertory Theatres; the York and Amas Musical Theatre Companies in Manhattan; and The Nora Theatre in Cambridge. His current works include Some Sweet Day, based on the history of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (book by Mac Pirkle and Don Jones); Silver Spoon, a romantic musical comedy that finds Upper East Side WASP plutocrats falling in love with Brooklyn-dwelling Jewish Communists (book by Amy Merrill); and Immigrant, starring six-time Grammy nominee John McCutcheon as labor agitator, songwriter, and martyr Joe Hill (book by Si Kahn; songs by Joe Hill). Si has recently been commissioned by the Bread and Roses Heritage Committee in Lawrence, Massachusetts to write a musical in honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of that historic “strike of the immigrants,” which will take place in 2012.
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