In April 2012, Erin Gruwell came back to a town she used to reside in for a Newport Beach Film Festival screening of Stories From an Undeclared War, Dennis Rice's documentary about Gruwell's experiences teaching at Long Beach's Woodrow Wilson High School and beginning her Freedom Writers Foundation.
On Wednesday, Gruwell comes back to her alma mater–UC Irvine–to do that same thing, although the picture now goes by Freedom Writers: Stories From an Undeclared War.
]
Gruwell rose to fame with her best-selling 1999 book, The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them, and the 2007 feature film that spun out of the book, Freedom Writers, which was written and directed by Richard LaGravenese and starred Hilary Swank as Gruwell.
UCI Student Center & Event Services presents Wednesday's free 7 p.m. screening, which will be followed by a Q&A session and book signing with Gruwell and some of her Freedom Writers. Books will be available for purchase. For more information, go here: http://goo.gl/MmPvdh.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.