Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army colonel and U.S. State Department official turned writer and activist.
Whilst working for the U.S. State Department, she served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassies in Afghanistan and also served in Sierra Leone, Uzbekistan and Nicaragua. Wright received the State Department award for heroism in 1997, after helping to evacuate several thousand people during the civil war in Sierra Leone.
Wright was one of three State Department officials to resign before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. She later testified that the Iraq war violated the U.S. constitution and international law.
Wright became an anti-war activist. She was arrested and convicted for disrupting a Senate Armed Service Committee at which General Petraeus was testifying. First arrested in 2005, she went on to collect her arrest bracelets. In 2006 Wright was awarded the Truthout Freedom and Democracy Awards. In 2017 she was awarded the U.S. Peace Prize. The foreword of Wright’s book Dissent: Voices of Conscience (co-authored with Susan Dixon) was written by Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
