The Daily Iowan - Faces of the UI: Tossed out of Burma, writer finds home here

The Daily Iowan - Faces of the UI: Tossed out of Burma, writer finds home here
Lini Ge - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 2/6/09 Section: Metro

When Kerry Howley handed her passport to the immigration officer at an airport in Rangoon, Burma, she caught a glimpse of something popping up on the officer's computer screen.

Soon Howley and her fiancé had a group of officials surrounding them. After a long period of waiting, the couple were grabbed and pushed into a plane leaving Burma.

"I can't go back there. I'm crushed," said Howley, who was recently deported from Burma because of what she had written about the government.

The 27-year-old Iowa Arts Fellow in the UI Nonfiction Writing Program embarked on her journalism career in Burma after receiving a B.A. in philosophy and English from Georgetown University in 2003.

During her two years of work at the Rangoon-based Myanmar Times, she covered international organizations in Burma and later became a features editor. Although the newspaper was heavily censored, Howley said, she had the best experience of her life in Burma.

"I completely love Rangoon," she said. "It was not a particularly sophisticated journalistic medium. It was more of an exercise of dealing with dictatorship and engaging with people I would never have gone to engage with otherwise."

And not every journalist has the guts to work in a country like Burma.

"She's completely brilliant and brave as hell - it takes courage to move to totalitarian Burma - and yet she doesn't have even the semblance of an ego," said Chaim Katz, a college instructor who refers to himself as "a longtime drinking buddy of Howley's."

Howley left Burma in 2005 after the newspaper was temporarily shut down and later joined Reason magazine.

Her work has appeared in various newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Reader's Digest. She has also been a guest on National Public Radio and Fox News shows.

One thing Howley writes extensively about is migration, a topic she was first motivated to cover while she was in Burma. Many Burmese who were seeking better career opportunities in other countries were rejected visas by officials in those countries, who assumed they would stay permanently.

"I found the lack of mobility horrifying. But it's something that nobody talks about in terms of human rights," she said. "It's a human-rights issue because locking people out of wealth-trading economies causes them to be poor."

She shared her perspectives on migration during a lecture at the UI in late January, titled "Migration and Human Rights: How Global Apartheid Keeps the Developing World Poor."

"I was trying to awaken people to the fact that borders are not a natural fact of the world, that it wasn't always this way, that it's extremely economically inefficient to restrict the movement of people in this particular way," she said.

"When you put a wall around an economically dead region and people can't get out, you confine people to a life of poverty."

Besides migration, she also writes on issues of taboo markets - including human organ markets - globalization, and sexual politics.

For her first cover story at Reason magazine, Howley sold one of her eggs and wrote about the experience of putting her own genetic material on the market.

Her writing has won respect from many of her colleagues and friends.

"She was always - and this is rare in political journalism - equally concerned with the craft and the ideas: With producing a tight, witty piece and with having a powerful argument that eschewed easy talking points," said Julian Sanchez, the Washington editor for Ars Technica and Howley's former colleague at Reason magazine.

But preferring the act of writing over constructing arguments, Howley joined the Nonfiction Writing Program last August.

"I want to just be able to focus on sentences and paragraphs, beautiful essays, instead of constant talking heads and argumentation," she said. "And that's exactly what I found here."

Katz said the program fits her perfectly.

"She's a fantastic storyteller … She makes small narratives gripping but never fails to illuminate the big picture," he said. "Whenever I get to the end of a Kerry Howley story, I always wish it were longer."