Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth

Essays, portraits, and profiles of fifty American peace activists

This third volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly’s striking color portraits and profiles of fifty peace activists as well as essays by Chris Hedges, Kali Rubaii, Paul K. Chappell, Medea Benjamin, Alice Rothchild, and David Swanson. The people honored in this book approach peacemaking in manifold ways. They have told the truth about the lies enabling war, they have protested, they have gone to jail for peace, made art imbued with the suffering of war, the stupidity of war and its cruelty, taught the curricula of peace, exposed the unspeakable wounds and trauma visited on children in war, and shown how environmentally historically, and psychologically wars never end. They have also shown how warmongers promote and profit obscenely from the business of industrial killing, how atrocity is celebrated as heroic. They resist, resist, resist. They act with love.

Robert Shetterly is a visual artist, social activist, and writer. For the past twenty years, he has painted portraits of citizens who address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness in the series Americans Who Tell the Truth, now the subject of the Kane Lewis feature-length documentary Truth Tellers, which is currently airing on American Public Television. Shetterly’s portrait project is also recorded in a multi-volume book series, including Portraits of Racial Justice and Portraits of Earth Justice, and Portraits of Peacemakers. Since 1990, Shetterly has been a producer of the Maine Masters Project and has served as President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists. Shetterly lives and works in Brooksville, Maine.