We’re happy to report that Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma has been re-issued with updated material. Originally published in 1997 by Lerner, this inspiring young adult biography by New Orleans writer Whitney Stewart is available again thanks to the tireless efforts of Professor Robert Fuller, who taught Aung San Suu Kyi at Methodist English High School in Rangoon in the early 1960’s. Dr. Fuller, now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska, was a resource for Whitney when she was writing her book.

The new edition features a preface by Dr. Sein Win, the Prime Minister of the democratic government of Burma in exile (the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma); an epilogue by Dr. Angelene Naw, biographer of both General Aung San, the father of Burma’s independence, and of Aung San Suu Kyi; and a timeline of events in Burma since 1997 by Dr. Ni Ni Swe, M.D., whose mother was a personal friend of Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother. Twenty new photographs are also included. For more information on the new edition, click here.

For more about Whitney’s interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, click here. For more about Whitney and her books (including her account of being rescued during Hurricane Katrina), check the following blog posts.

And a personal update: Whitney and her family evacuated to Shreveport, Louisiana, before Hurricane Gustav’s arrival earlier this week. They are home again now, having seen much wind and water damage in northern Louisiana en route. A fallen telephone pole missed their house by inches and they are now busy cleaning up fallen trees, “happy and grateful to be home.”

Whitney’s forthcoming children’s books are Marshall: A Nantucket Rescue (Soundprints), Mr. Lincoln’s Gift (Hildene), and Who Was Walt Disney? (Penguin).

I asked children’s book writer Whitney Stewart to tell us about meeting Aung San Suu Kyi, subject of her young adult biography, Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma. As a mother herself, Whitney reflects on this brave mother’s difficult decision:

On the morning of July 20, 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi (ahng sahn soo chee) woke up in her childhood home in Rangoon, the capital of Burma. “Something is happening,” her cousin told her. “There are lots of soldiers all over the place.”Aung San Suu Kyi knew she was about to be detained for her part in the peaceful democracy movement in Burma. She didn’t try to go past the truckloads of government soldiers barricading her front gate. She calmly told her sons, Alexander and Kim, that she would be put under house arrest and that their father would take them back to their home in England. She would stay in Burma to stand up for her countrymen and women. She went on a hunger strike to ensure decent treatment of the pro-democracy students who were dragged away from her compound. Despite Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts, Burma’s military government jailed and tortured pro-democracy supporters. It continues to do so today.

In 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi was released temporarily from house arrest. I went to Burma to interview her for a young adult biography. I wanted to understand what led a woman to give up her family life to help her country. I wondered how she coped with solitary confinement. Aung San Suu Kyi told me about her daily meditation practice. She said she could not abandon all of Burma’s young sons in order to go back to England and take care of her own two.

I left our interview inspired. But I also realized that I could not do what this Nobel laureate has done. I couldn’t miss out on my child’s life no matter how much I grieved for others. I spent three weeks in Burma dodging the government spy who watched me, and worrying about my three-year-old at home. Burma’s mothers spend a lifetime of worry.

Aung San Suu Kyi has a fortitude that I don’t. “The future is democracy for Burma,” she says. “It is going to happen, and I am going to be here when it happens.”

Events in Burma continue to unfold; Whitney recommends checking here and here for current information and for ways to help. Her biography of Aung San Suu Kyi will be re-issued in June, 2008, with proceeds going to help the Burmese cause.

“Katrina did something to my psyche,” says New Orleans children’s writer Whitney Stewart. Along with her teenage son and her 87-year-old mother-in-law, and with a cast on her own injured ankle, she was rescued by helicopter late at night after five days stranded on the fifth floor of the Tulane Medical School building during the hurricane’s aftermath. It was “a crazy, chaotic, unsettling experience… We’d tried earlier to leave but our rescue boat had been overtaken by people with guns… After Katrina, I needed to do new things. I needed a new paradigm for New Orleans.”

Whitney is now learning to kayak and doing volunteer work with the public schools. On a whim, the former high school actor sent photos of herself, her guitarist son, and her geneticist husband to casting agents; her son landed a role in “Cirque de Freak,” to be filmed in New Orleans this year.

But this writer had an adventurous life long before Katrina. After trekking the Himalaya twenty years ago with her mom, Whitney, who’d discovered her affinity for the biographical form as a Brown undergrad, wrote biographies for children of the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Sir Edmund Hillary, and the Buddha. Her love of travel has also led her to write two young adult novels that present kids’ eye views of New Orleans (Jammin’ on the Avenue) and San Francisco (Blues Across the Bay).

A primary concern is getting across the message of subjects like the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. Her biography, Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma, is soon to be re-issued, with proceeds going to a non-profit that benefits the Burmese cause. “I’m amazed that so few people have heard of her,” Whitney told me. She’ll tell us about meeting this brave Burmese woman in an upcoming guest blog. Stay tuned!