Rose Burgunder Styron (born April 4, 1928) is an American poet, journalist, and human rights activist.[1] She is a founding member of Amnesty International USA,[2] [3] becoming a board member in 1970.[4]
Styron is the subject of the documentary In the Company of Rose, directed by James Lapine, which debuted in 2022.[5] [6] Her most recent book is a memoir, Beyond This Harbor, published in 2023.[7]
Rose Burgunder Styron was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1928,[8] where she spent her childhood. The daughter of B. B. Burgunder (father) and Selma Kann, (mother),[9] her family's heritage was German Jewish,[10] though it was described as a secular, non-observant Jewish household.[8] She attended grade school at the Quaker Friends School of Baltimore.[4]
Burgunder attended Wellesley College, where she graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree.[11] She was Class Poet and won Wellesley's John Masefield Prize for "the best poem written by a member of the senior class."[4] Next, she earned her MFA at Johns Hopkins University, where she met her future husband, novelist William Styron, when she attended a reading he was giving. Burgunder said that, for her, this first meeting was not memorable.[4]
Rose Styron joined Amnesty International USA in 1970, after attending a writer's conference in Moscow and Tashkent.[3] She has chaired PEN’s Freedom-to-Write Committee and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awards, and has served on the boards of the Academy of American Poets, the Association to Benefit Children, and The Brain and Creativity Institute at USC.[3] Styron is a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and was on the Council on Foreign Relations.[4] [2]
Styron’s 2023 memoir Beyond This Harbor is partly about her work as an activist, which involved traveling around the world, working to free prisoners of conscience. Writing about Styron’s memoir, Harvey Wasserman describes it as being, in part, “a harrowing travelogue through eastern Europe and southeast Asia to the unspeakable travesties of our own horrific prisons and the infuriating hypocrisies of our worst politicians.”[12]
Styron is the author of four volumes of poetry. She has known that poetry was her deepest calling since the age of9.[4]
Styron has also worked as a translator on two books of Russian poetry, and has been a contributor to various other writing projects. As a journalist, she has published articles on human rights and foreign policy in many magazines, newspapers, and journals.
As an "upholder of her husband's legacy" after his death in 2006,[8] she edited The Selected Letters of William Styron, a project that was a two-year commitment.
Styron was finally able to assemble a new book of her own poems, Fierce Day, published in 2015. It was her first new volume of poems since By Vineyard Light appeared in 1995. She says: "I became obsessed with helping to change antihuman policies abroad. I stopped writing poetry. For twenty years."[8]
In 1952, while doing a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Burgunder renewed a passing acquaintance with a young novelist, William Styron, who had just won the Rome Prize for his novel Lie Down in Darkness.[9] For their first date, they were chaperoned by Truman Capote. Before the date was over, Capote told Styron that he needed to marry this woman.[7]
They were married in Rome in the spring of 1953. Together, they had four children: daughter Susanna Styron is a film director; daughter Paola is an internationally acclaimed modern dancer; daughter Alexandra Styron is a writer, known for the 2001 novel All The Finest Girls and her memoir Reading My Father published in 2011; son Thomas is a professor of clinical psychology at Yale University.