PEN America Works of Justice
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
C. Fausto Cabrera and Zeke Caligiuri on Precarity and Critical Resistance
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In November 2023, Coffee House Press released American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, an anthology of essays edited by a collective of incarce...
Lisa Biggs on Black Women's Healing and Prison Performance Programs
27 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Theater harnesses the power to both break worlds down, and build worlds of our choosing. As a performer and a former community engagement specialist f...
Lacino Hamilton on Intentionality and the Language of Justice
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Jennifer Baker on Restorative Justice in Young Adult Fiction
18 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 you...
Ethan Heard and Marcus Scott on Adapting Beethoven in the age of Black Lives Matter
30 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Beethoven's 1805 opera Fidelio, a man who has been wrongly imprisoned, and his wife must bring him justice. More than two centuries later, H...
Damascus James on Witnessing, Letter Writing, and Solitary Confinement
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In January 2023, people incarcerated throughout the state of Texas organized a collective hunger strike to demand better living conditions. A couple y...
Tommy Trantino on Perseverance and Protest
21 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ask Tommy Trantino to describe himself, and he may simply respond, “endless.” Ask him the same question on another day, and the answer will be dif...
Tracy D. Schlapp and Danny J. Wilson on Cultivating Writing Communities Inside Oregon Prisons
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, Tracy D. Schlapp and Danny J. Wilson were inspired by Johnny Cash’s album, At Folsom Prison (1968), to stage concerts of Cash's mus...
Damien M. Sojoyner on Ethnography and Histories of Resistance in Los Angeles
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For over 50 years, the Southern California Library has made history a practice. Housing an extensive collection of histories of community resistance i...
Hugh Ryan on Carceral Archives and Queer History
19 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The New York Women's House of Detention was a fixture of Greenwich Village from 1932 to 1974. For public historian Hugh Ryan, its position as a cultur...
Celes Tisdale on Remembering the Attica Prison Uprising Through Poetry
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the latest episode of PEN America’s Works of Justice podcast, Malcolm Tariq, senior manager of editorial projects for PEN America’s Prison and ...
Prince Shakur on Masculinity, Queerness, and Histories of Incarceration
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With When They Tell You To Be Good (Tin House, 2022), Prince Shakur delivers a political coming of age memoir on growing up as a queer child in a Jama...
Andy West on Teaching Philosophy in Prisons
16 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy (Picador, 2022), Andy West writes about his experiences teaching philosophy in prisons i...
Keeda J. Haynes on Second-Chance Culture and Standing in Her Truth
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Bending the Arc: My Journey from Prison to Politics (Seal Books, 2021), Keeda J. Haynes pulls back the veil on what happens in the criminal legal s...
Marlon Peterson on Harm, Healing, and Breaking Free
21 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Marlon Peterson’s Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song (Bold Type Books, 2021) is a poignant look at what it means to transform one’s li...
Dorothy E. Roberts on Ending the Child Welfare System to Build Safer Futures
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Postgraduate Fellow Sophia Ramirez interviews legal scholar, sociologist, and social justice advocate Dorothy E...
Mahogany L. Browne on Collectivism, Bearing Witness, and Unhanding the Ego
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
PEN American Prison and Justice Writing Director Caits Meissner talks with Lincoln Center Poet-In-Residence Mahogany L. Browne about Browne’s new Ch...
Derecka Purnell on the Necessary Unlearning of Policing
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Postgraduate Fellow Sophia Ramirez speaks with Derecka Purnell about her latest book, Becoming Abolitionists: P...
David Sanchez on Addiction, Subjectivity, and Selfhood
15 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
PEN America Postgraduate Fellow Emma Stammen talks with 2018-2019 Writing for Justice Fellow David Sanchez about his debut novel All Day is a Long Tim...