Author : H. Bruce Franklin
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 20,23 MB
Release : 1998-06-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1440621284
"Harrowing in their frank detail and desperate tone, the selections in this anthology pack an emotional wallop...Should be required reading for anyone concerned about the violence in our society and the high rate of recidivism."—Publishers Weekly. Includes work by: Jack London, Nelson Algren, Chester Himes,Jack Henry Abbott, Robert Lowell, Malcolm X, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Piri Thomas.
Author : Bell Gale Chevigny
Publisher : Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Page : 572 pages
File Size : 39,47 MB
Release : 2011-11-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1611451442
A special collection of the best fiction, essays, poetry, and plays from annual PEN Prison Writing contest offers unique insights into the emotions and thoughts engendered by the prison experience, ranging from humor and empathy to rage, fear, and despair. 15,000 first printing.
Author : Leonard Peltier
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 28,46 MB
Release : 2016-04-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1250119286
In September of 2022, twenty-five years after Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents, the DNC unanimously passed a resolution urging President Joe Biden to release him. Peltier has affirmed his innocence ever since his sentencing in 1977--his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen's bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse--and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. Prison Writings is a wise and unsettling book, both memoir and manifesto, chronicling his life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. He also locates his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government's injustices. Edited by Harvey Arden, with an Introduction by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and a Preface by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Author : PEN America
Publisher : Haymarket Books
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 32,65 MB
Release : 2022-01-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1642596779
The Sentences That Create Us draws from the unique insights of over fifty justice-involved contributors and their allies to offer inspiration and resources for creating a literary life in prison. Centering in the philosophy that writers in prison can be as vibrant and capable as writers on the outside, and have much to offer readers everywhere, The Sentences That Create Us aims to propel writers in prison to launch their work into the world beyond the walls, while also embracing and supporting the creative community within the walls. The Sentences That Create Us is a comprehensive resource writers can grow with, beginning with the foundations of creative writing. A roster of impressive contributors including Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems), Mitchell S. Jackson (Survival Math), Wilbert Rideau (In the Place of Justice) and Piper Kerman (Orange is the New Black), among many others, address working within and around the severe institutional, emotional, psychological and physical limitations of writing prison through compelling first-person narratives. The book’s authors offer pragmatic advice on editing techniques, pathways to publication, writing routines, launching incarcerated-run prison publications and writing groups, lesson plans from prison educators and next-step resources. Threaded throughout the book is the running theme of addressing lived trauma in writing, and writing’s capacity to support an authentic healing journey centered in accountability and restoration. While written towards people in the justice system, this book can serve anyone seeking hard won lessons and inspiration for their own creative—and human—journey.
Author : Simon Rolston
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 41,78 MB
Release : 2021-06-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1771125187
Prison Life Writing is the first full-length study of one of the most controversial genres in American literature. By exploring the complicated relationship between life writing and institutional power, this book reveals the overlooked aesthetic innovations of incarcerated people and the surprising literary roots of the U.S. prison system. Simon Rolston observes that the autobiographical work of incarcerated people is based on a conversion narrative, a story arc that underpins the concept of prison rehabilitation and that sometimes serves the interests of the prison system, rather than those on the inside. Yet many imprisoned people rework the conversion narrative the way they repurpose other objects in prison. Like a radio motor retooled into a tattoo gun, the conversion narrative has been redefined by some authors for subversive purposes, including questioning the ostensible emancipatory role of prison writing, critiquing white supremacy, and broadly reimagining autobiographical discourse. An interdisciplinary work that brings life writing scholarship into conversation with prison studies and law and literature studies, Prison Life Writing theorizes how life writing works in prison, explains literature’s complicated entanglements with institutional power, and demonstrates the political and aesthetic innovations of one of America’s most fascinating literary genres.
Author : David Coogan
Publisher :
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 11,80 MB
Release : 2015-09-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781939930590
Detailing the formative and transformative memories of ten men, 'Writing Our Way Out' is the creative culmination of a writing class that began in the Richmond City Jail in Virginia, and grew into a journey to re-entry. Compiled in a narrative by their teacher, Dr. David Coogan, these stories explore the conditions, traps, and turning points on the path to imprisonment in modern America, as well as the redemptive and rehabilitative power of memoir.
Author : Doran Larson
Publisher : MSU Press
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 11,57 MB
Release : 2014-02-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1628950196
At 2.26 million, incarcerated Americans not only outnumber the nation’s fourth-largest city, they make up a national constituency bound by a shared condition. Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America presents more than seventy essays from twenty-seven states, written by incarcerated Americans chronicling their experience inside. In essays as moving as they are eloquent, the authors speak out against a national prison complex that fails so badly at the task of rehabilitation that 60% of the 650,000 Americans released each year return to prison. These essays document the authors’ efforts at self-help, the institutional resistance such efforts meet at nearly every turn, and the impact, in money and lives, that this resistance has on the public. Directly confronting the images of prisons and prisoners manufactured by popular media, so-called reality TV, and for-profit local and national news sources, Fourth City recognizes American prisoners as our primary, frontline witnesses to the dysfunction of the largest prison system on earth. Filled with deeply personal stories of coping, survival, resistance, and transformation, Fourth City should be read by every American who believes that law should achieve order in the cause of justice rather than at its cost.
Author : Joe Lockard
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 44,89 MB
Release : 2018-07-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0815654286
In a time of increasing mass incarceration, US prisons and jails are becoming a major source of literary production. Prisoners write for themselves, fellow prisoners, family members, and teachers. However, too few write for college credit. In the dearth of well-organized higher education in US prisons, noncredit programs established by colleges and universities have served as a leading means of informal learning in these settings. Thousands of teachers have entered prisons, many teaching writing or relying on writing practices when teaching other subjects. Yet these teachers have few pedagogical resources. This groundbreaking collection of essays provides such a resource and establishes a framework upon which to develop prison writing programs. Prison Pedagogies does not champion any one prescriptive approach to writing education but instead recognizes a wide range of possibilities. Essay subjects include working-class consciousness and prison education; community and literature writing at different security levels in prisons; organized writing classes in jails and juvenile halls; cultural resistance through writing education; prison newspapers and writing archives as pedagogical resources; dialogical approaches to teaching prison writing classes; and more. The contributors within this volume share a belief that writing represents a form of intellectual and expressive self-development in prison, one whose pursuit has transformative potential.
Author : Michelle Kelly
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 24,38 MB
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000215733
Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature, textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literary-critical methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise, it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison and the literary world.
Author : Julian Broadhead
Publisher : Waterside Press
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 39,5 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Prisoners as authors
ISBN : 1872870406
Reviews of the previous edition: 'A remarkable anthology wich will interest everyone concerned with the fate of prisoners and anxious to see their conditions improved': Michael McMullan, Justice of the Peace. 'This fascinating and very readable collection of fact, fiction and verse is the fifteenth issue edited and produced by two probation officers from Sheffield. We are fortunate that they have found a new publisher in Waterside Press to continue giving prisoners (and others), an opportunity to do something wich all writers crave - find an audience to communicate their feelings and experiences... The contributors give deeply personal insights into the nature of their world and prove that imagination and talent are incapable of being destroyed if people are ready to develop them... This anthology deserves to be read... by everyone who is interested in new writers experimenting with the development of their talent. Each piece is different and compelling: David Underhill, The Magistrate. This 16th edition is an entirely new collection of writings by prisoners and other people connected with prisons, from the United Kingdom and beyond.
