LAURA JOHNSTON KOHL
Laura Johnston Kohl grew up as an activist in Washington, D.C., and watched as many of her heroes were assassinated in the 1960s. While she was in high school and college, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and others were killed. That had a huge impact on her. She attended college in Connecticut and continued her commitment to work for change and to make a difference. While exercising her civil rights to protest peacefully, she was tear-gassed while protesting the war in Vietnam. After a brief marriage, a visit to Woodstock, and a stint working with the Black Panthers, she moved to California to join her sister.
Soon after that, she was introduced to Peoples Temple and spent the next nine years in California and Guyana. She was away from Jonestown on the day when 913 of her friends and family died. The next twenty years were spent recovering, and rebuilding her life. For the first ten years, she lived in Synanon, a residential community. The following ten years, with her husband and young son, she began rebuilding her life. She earned her BA in philosophy/psychology, and then earned her California Teaching Credential. She also found some peace by becoming a Quaker. She has become a public speaker about Peoples Temple and is on the Speakers’ Bureau of the Jonestown Institute. She has been interviewed locally, nationally, and internationally on television, on radio, in newspapers, in documentaries, and for research papers. She has written many articles about the details of life in Peoples Temple and her survival. She has written a wide-range of articles in the annual Jonestown Report. She is an annual speaker at the Communal Studies Association Conference, and her scholarly work is published in their Communal Societies Journal. She continues to make frequent presentations at universities, libraries, book stores, conferences, and on internet radio. She was recently interviewed on Ben Modo Live television show, and several documentaries on different aspects of Peoples Temple. Laura gets a number of requests for interviews from all around the world every week.
In March 2010, she published her own book, JONESTOWN SURVIVOR: An Insider’s Look. She continues to make frequent speeches locally and nationally about her experiences. She and her family live in San Diego, California, and she is a retired bilingual public school teacher and Quaker. She has been chosen as "A Woman of the Year 2011-12" by the National Association for Professional Women. She was also nominated as "Teacher of the Year" by her middle school. In October 2012, she was added to the Board of Directors of the Communal Studies Association. She is a member of ReadLocal San Diego, and Writers and Publishers of San Diego, as well as other authors' groups.
In the last few years, after retiring from full-time public school teaching, she has traveled extensively across the country from Hawaii to New York, and Seattle to Florida. She speaks at universities about New Religions, survival, Peoples Temple and Jonestown, psychology, cults, Critical Thinking, writing, and the decades of the 1960s and 1970s – and the evolution of Peoples Temple during those twenty years. She also teachers OSHER classes around the country and speaks at Quaker Meetings and other venues. She is on the Advisory Committee of the California Historical Society's Peoples Temple Archives.
JONESTOWN SURVIVOR: An Insider’s Look is available in print or in eBook format on amazon.com. (Publisher iUniverse). It is also available on Nook, through Barnes and Noble. The audio recording of her book is available through ACX audible.com, and is available with the "whisper" program that links the ebook with the audio book.
Laura Johnston Kohl can be reached at ljohnstonkohl@gmail.com.