DAHLONEGA

— E. Benjamin Skinner, a journalist and senior fellow at Brandeis University who wrote "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery" after witnessing the sale of human beings around the world, will be speaking Monday at North Georgia College & State University.

The free event begins at 7 p.m. in the Hoag Auditorium and is open to the public. The lecture is sponsored by the Ideas and Issues Committee of the university’s Student Activities Board.

Skinner will sign books after the lecture and the Campus Connection bookstore will have copies of "A Crime So Monstrous" available for purchase.

Skinner first met a survivor of slavery in 2003 while on assignment in Sudan for Newsweek International and began traveling the world to find others.

Though estimates put the number of slaves higher today than it ever has been, Skinner faced difficulties in finding them.

"A Crime So Monstrous" details his work, including going undercover to infiltrate trafficking networks and witness slave sales involving harems in Dubai, brothels in Bucharest, child markets in Haiti and slave quarries in India.

Skinner also touches on the political and personal battles involved in the new abolitionist movement. He tells the stories of the people involved on all sides of the issue — those who live in slavery and those who have escaped, those who own or traffic in slaves, and those who are combatting the crime.

The shocking and brutally honest book was the basis for a "Nightline" special report and the inspiration for an episode of NBC’s television drama "Law & Order." Skinner is donating 25 percent of the book’s royalties to groups dedicated to fighting slavery.

Recently named National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, Skinner is a graduate of Wesleyan University. He is currently a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute at Brandeis University and lives in New York.

Skinner was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, served as a research associate for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and as special assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.