Rancho Palos Verdes resident and Cal State Long Beach professor Teri Yamada, along with her Cambodia-based colleague Kho Taraith, who she works with on the Nou Hach Literary Project, have been lauded with the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award.

Yamada supervises -- and Taraith, from Phnom Penh, actually directs -- the project, an international organization that supports Cambodian literature, writers and academics. (Nou Hach was one of Cambodia’s finest early modern writers, an intellectual and a diplomat.) .

“I’m thrilled that we have received this award,” said Yamada, a faculty member of the university's Comparative World Literature and Classics Department. She said she is proud of the project’s reputation as a literary organization that will publish any kind of literary expression within the genres of short fiction and poetry.

“There are other literary organizations in Cambodia directed by the government where participants must belong to a specific political party," Yamada added. "We don’t do that. We are apolitical. Everyone is welcome.”

The project’s cultural efforts include the Nou Hach Literary Journal, the Nou Hach literary competition -- an annual writer’s conference, the writer’s workshops, the classical poetry CD and booklet, the newspaper insert of short fiction and poetry, a literary radio program and a literacy outreach to rural areas.

Yamada's future goals include setting up an Internet café and desktop publishing business to provide an independent source of revenue. She anticipates using the award's accompanying $5,000 grant to fund the
upcoming fifth issue of the Nou Hach Literary Journal as well as a new printer and computer for the Phnom Penh office.

She'll officially receive the award in April at the annual PEN benefit dinner hosted by International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights and international literary organization.

Administered by the Association of American Publishers, the Laber Award is given annually to a book publisher outside the United States who has demonstrated courage and fortitude in the face of political persecution. First bestowed in 2003, it has previously recognized such groups as the independent Iranian publishing community, in care of the Shirin Ebadi Center for Defenders of Human Rights.

The award is named in honor of Jeri Laber, one of the founding members of the International Freedom To Publish Committee, who served as co-founder and director of Helsinki Watch from 1979 to 1995. The IFTPC itself was founded by the Association of American Publishers in 1975. It was one of first groups in the world formed specifically to defend and broaden the freedom of the written word and to protect and promote the rights of book publishers and authors around the world.

For more information about the Nou Hach Literary project and Journal, see www.nouhachjournal.net.