Founder's Take: A Reminder of What's Possible
I read the Iliad in three days. The reading launched me into a fever dream, where instead of binge-watching Netflix, I lost myself in the familiar and unfamiliar world of Homer. I read while lying in bed, while riding in cars, while sitting in restaurants. Though there were parts of the story I knew, the Fagles translation was a wholly new landscape of sound and layering of ideas that I’d only glimpsed. The book-length poem that asks a reader to sit with an entire world on nearly every page teeming with the dead, the men they were on and off the battlefield, and the homes that war would prevent them from returning. The book became my companion. I didn’t read while sleeping but read while walking nearly 30,000 steps one Sunday afternoon. I read instead of eating, instead of sleeping. When Priam knelt beside the man who’d killed his son in combat, and kissed his hands, and begged for his departed son’s body, I wept.
Continue ReadingResisting the Lines: Carrying Prison Wherever You Go
Taking the train from New Haven to Grand Central Station for the first time was the first step of my journey to Tribeca. Then again, maybe my first step was getting out of prison last July. Or maybe it was two years earlier, when I was granted a commutation and my 48-year sentence became 30. Being outside gave me access to a kind of freedom that Dwayne talks about throughout March Forth, a documentary about his incarceration as a juvenile. The film also raised questions that I still cannot answer: When does freedom truly begin for those of us released from prison? And what does it mean to be free when you carry prison with you wherever you go?
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IDOC hosts Freedom Reads for Inside Literary Prize event at Logan and Shawnee Correctional Center
Last week the Illinois Department of Corrections welcomed the national non-profit Freedom Reads to Logan and Shawnee Correctional Centers to facilitate book discussions, voting and author events for the third annual Inside Literary Prize.
Illinois Department of Corrections Hosts Freedom Reads for Inside Literary Prize Events at Logan and Shawnee Correctional Centers
Launched in 2023 by Freedom Reads, the National Book Foundation, and the Center for Justice Innovation with support from Lori Feathers, the Inside Literary Prize is the first-ever US-based literary prize awarded exclusively by currently incarcerated people. This week, incarcerated readers at both Logan and Shawnee Correctional Centers are serving as judges for the 2026 Prize.
Why a Cellmate is Not like a Roommate
“The prison is like an isolated town with nowhere to go. And the cell is our whole house,” Biktor B. writes, adding that this “house” is shared by complete and often incompatible strangers, who have next to nothing in common.
What Is it Like to Live in a Halfway House?
Kashawn Taylor writes about the expectations and realities of living in a halfway house after leaving prison, noting “it feels like freedom, with an asterisk.”
Latest Episode
The Past's Presence: Jesmyn Ward
In today’s episode, Jesmyn Ward reads from her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is at once a bildungsroman, a ghost story, an epic, and a road novel. In portraying the suck of Parchman Prison on the generations of one Mississippi family, Ward deftly explores how the real threat of incarceration haunts these psyches and, in turn, these familial relationships. In this moving conversation, Ward reflects on living with grief, on listening for communications from beyond our immediate reality, and on the central commitments of her work: to restore agency to the kinds of characters too often denied a voice—and to grant acceptance to the ones harder to forgive. (July 26, 2021)