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Tommy Trantino on Perseverance and Protest
I was introduced to Tommy Trantino in a 2020 undergraduate capstone seminar, “Life Sentences: Literature of the Prison,” in The College of New Jersey’s Department of English. The seminar was primarily...
View ArticleUprooting the Lie
I’ve been in one type of state-run institution or another since the age of 12. As a child, my behavior was so bad that my family would tell me I wasn’t going to make it to see 25. They weren’t...
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Unsealed: An Open Letter from No More Victims Road
Of the hundreds of addresses I come across on the envelopes from incarcerated people around the country, there is one street name in particular that has never left my mind: No More Victims Road. The...
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Damascus James on Witnessing, Letter Writing, and Solitary Confinement
In January 2023, people incarcerated throughout the state of Texas organized a collective hunger strike to demand better living conditions. Months before, Canada native Damascus James had relocated to...
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On Prison Art and Music
Joseph Wilson and I sit at an antique Casio keyboard in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility music room. He’s hunched over the keys, concentrating deeply while playing a new song he’s composed....
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Introducing The Freewrite Project Zine
The writings in this collection were done as part of a series of pilot writer’s workshops seeded by PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program. For more than five decades, the program has worked...
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Unsealed: On That Old Rock Pile Prison Quilt Project
Life behind prison walls is often dark, desolate, and dismal. Uniform colors are typically neutral or muted, access to natural light is scarce, and increasing mail digitization practices are erasing...
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Jennifer Baker on Restorative Justice in Young Adult Fiction
How far would you go for forgiveness? This is the question stamped on the cover of Forgive Me Not (Nancy Paulsen Books / Penguin, 2023), the debut young adult novel by Jennifer Baker. The novel...
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Unsealed: In Spite of Prison Walls
As censorship practices continue to worsen in carceral facilities across the country, receiving books has been an increasingly difficult challenge for incarcerated individuals. Prisons, jails, and...
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Lacino Hamilton on Intentionality and the Language of Justice
This month marks the three-year anniversary of the exoneration of Lacino Hamilton, who was falsely incarcerated for the murder of his foster mother at the age of 19. Sentenced to at least 50 years in...
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