Larry Siems

Larry Siems is a writer and human rights activist whose work has appeared in a wide range of publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Slate, and The Nation. He edited and introduced Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, the first-ever account of the notorious facility by a still-detained prisoner, and he has collaborated with Slahi on the novel The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga and other projects since Slahi’s release. Siems is also the author of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, which drew on 140,000 pages of formerly secret government documents to construct a comprehensive narrative of the Bush administration’s torture program, and Between the Lines: Letters from Undocumented Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends. His human rights advocacy includes serving for many years as director of the Freedom to Write Programs at PEN USA West in Los Angeles and then PEN America in New York, and he is currently Chief of Staff of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.