This is a list of resources I've consulted to learn about teaching writing and incarceration. The final section lists work by incarcerated writers, some of which is included in my course reading. 

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TEACHING  
These are referenced in my Teaching Philosophy

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Berthoff, Anne. The Making of Meaning. Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1981, pp. 19-29, 61- 72, 80-84.

 

Booth, Wayne C. “LITCOMP.” Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap, ed. Winifred Bryson Horner, University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 57-80.

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Carter, Michael. “Postface.”  Where Writing Begins: A Postmodern Reconstruction, South Illinois University Press, 2003, pp.   209-211.

 

Rose, Mike. “The Politics of Remediation.” Lives on the Boundary, Penguin, 1989, pp. 167-173.

 

Slevin, James. “Academic Literacy and the Discipline of English.” Profession, Modern Language Association, 2007, pp. 200-209.

 

Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 2, National Council of Teachers of English, 1982, pp. 148-156.

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TEACHING - additional

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Radical Teacher. University of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh Press. https://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher.

This journal is a socialist, feminist, antic-racist publication that publishes articles on progressive education. Many articles offer approaches to the writing classroom, and working in nontraditional classrooms. Issue no. 88, “Teaching Against the Prison Industrial Complex,” is of particular interest for those interest in teaching about mass incarceration. Full PDFs are available for free from 2013 on, and issues from 1975-2013 can be accessed through JSTOR.

 

UNDERSTANDING INCARCERATION

https://carceralstudies.duke.edu/.

Duke’s Carceral Studies Network Project website offers a robust, fantastic collection of materials primarily geared towards academics and those interested in a “deeper dive” into the study of incarceration, though many of the texts reviewed are meant for a broader public. Nonfiction books, documentaries, recorded speeches, podcasts, films, blogs, and peer-reviewed journal articles are summarized on the Project’s website, and the site links to other prison-related information, projects, and initiatives. As a pedagogical tool, the site culls different syllabi from professors teaching about incarceration all over the country.

 

https://harvardlawreview.org/issues/volume-132-issue-6/

This issue of The Harvard Law Review focuses specifically on prison abolition and current legal debates. 

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https://www.aaihs.org/prison-abolition-syllabus/

This is a wealth of sources that seek to “contextualize and highlight prison organizing and prison abolitionist efforts from the 13th Amendment’s rearticulation of slavery to current resistance to mass incarceration, solitary confinement, and prison labor exploitation.”

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LITERATURE BY INCARCERATED WRITERS

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Chevigny, Bell Gale. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing. 1st ed., Arcade Pub., 1999.

 

Forché, Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. 1st ed., W.W. Norton, 1993.

This collection has poetry by writers throughout the world, and throughout history, facing state-sponsored violence. Many of the poets write about their incarceration.

 

Franklin, H. Bruce. Prison Writing in 20th-Century America. Penguin Books, 1998.

This  is one of the most well-known anthologies edited by H. Bruce Franklin, who has been publishing work by the incarcerated since 1982. Franklin establishes narratives and work songs of enslaved Africans as the origins of modern U.S. prison writing, and thus draws a line between chattel slavery and modern mass incarceration. (This is taken up by many scholars, notably by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.)  In addition to being bound to the U.S. in the 20th century, each piece of writing in the anthology is “about prison experience,” which Franklin goes on to explain “focuses the collection into a vision of America from the bottom, an anatomy of the American prison, and an exploration of the meanings of imprisonment” (1). Some of the writing is nonfiction (essay, personal account, letter, manifesto), some is fictional prose, and some is poetry. Some of the writers are political prisoners (that is, imprisoned either implicitly or explicitly for their activism), while others are not. Three of the sections are delineated historically (“From Plantation to Penitentiary,” “The Early Modern American Prison,” “The American Gulag Today,”) and there’s a section about activism (“The Movement and the Prison”) and one about explicitly literary work (“The Literary Renaissance”).

 

James, Joy. The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. State University of New York Press, 2005.

This collection presents work by “prisoner-abolitionists,” people who have been incarcerated in the U.S. and advocate for prison abolition.

 

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/15/notes-from-a-dead-house/

Journalist Max Nelson curated this series on prison writing for The Paris Review, in which he revisits mostly well-known texts (fiction, poetry, erotica, religious texts, philosophy, memoir) by writers who the reading public may not know were incarcerated. After explaining the context of each writer’s imprisonment, Nelson interrogates the text with this dimension in mind. Nelson uses the broad heading of “prison writing” to cluster writers that otherwise fall into separate categories, and asks us to interpret writing that is usually interpreted through other lenses with the knowledge that incarceration is part of the writer’s lived experience.

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Soto, Christopher. “Poetry in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Challenging the Dichotomy of Innocence Versus Criminality.” Poetry Foundation, 25 Sept. 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/09/poetry-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration-challenging-the-dichotomy-of-innocence-versus-criminality

In this blog post, poet Christopher Soto asks readers to expand what might be considered “prison poetry” to include not only poetry by people who are or have been incarcerated, but also poetry by family members, friends, visitors and teachers of the incarcerated (such as C.D. Wright and Idra Novey, who teach inside, and Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, who write about incarcerated family members); poetry about the history of prison (like Layli Long Soldier’s “38” and and Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion); and poetry about any aspect of violence at the hands of the law (like June Jordan’s “Poem About Police Violence,” Evie Schockley’s “Statistical Haiku,” and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen). Using this approach, Soto argues, challenges the dichotomy of innocence and criminality, because it shows that incarceration reaches beyond those who are inside in ways obvious (like to visiting family members) and less obvious (people contending with police violence), and posits that the main feature of incarceration is not criminality or guilt (which validates the law’s use of these categories), but something else: control, perhaps, at the hands of the state, or resistance to normative ontologies put forth by the law.