Named for the late acclaimed author Madeleine L’Engle and her 10-year written friendship with scholar, writer and former Black Party leader Ahmad Rahman, the PEN America/L’Engle Rahman Prize for Mentorship honors four mentor/mentee pairs in PEN America’s longstanding prison writing mentorship program, which links established writers with those currently incarcerated.
The prize was generously endowed by L’Engle’s family and memorializes L’Engle’s participation as one of the program’s very first mentors, along with Rahman’s extraordinary journey from serving 21 years in prison—framed in an FBI sting of the Panthers—to celebrated and beloved assistant professor of African and African-American History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The pair began writing in the early 1970s, establishing a rigorous working rapport that informed both of their works.
Read this poignant essay to learn more about the history of this incredible partnership »
Watch a captivating performance of L’Engle and Rahman’s letters, edited and staged by L’Engle’s granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis and actor Eric Berryman:
2020 Honorees
These four mentor/mentee pairs (or perhaps better stated in some ways as mentor/mentor pairs) showcase the best of what it means to treat those on the inside as equally human, equally meaningful, equally as capable of stirring our imaginations through the written word. Read their short but poignant reflective essays on the experience of mentorship below.
Benjamin Frandsen and Noelia Cerna, “Longing to be Heard”
“Not once did [Noelia] ever make me feel like a convict, an inmate, a prisoner. To her, I was simply a writer with whom she exchanged creative flow, a fellow imbiber of the literati latte.”
—Benjamin Frandsen
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“I met Benjamin during one of the most trying times of my own personal life, and his strength taught me that although people and situations can sometimes make us feel like we are cornered, the one thing we have control over is our thoughts and our perspectives.”
—Noelia Cerna
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Elizabeth Hawes and Jeffrey James Keyes, “A Golden Partnership”
“You appreciate the magic moment in time when those people made you better at your craft and as a person. Jeffrey’s mentorship has been that to me. A brief, yet important connection that helped produce something that was very important to me. From one artist to another, I know we both left each other feeling valued and empowered.”
—Elizabeth Hawes
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“Elizabeth is a fearless storyteller. I immediately picked up that she had an urgency to produce high-quality work. . . I hung onto every word [of the sample of her play] and continued to with each submission. I found myself reading Elizabeth’s submissions not once or twice, but three or four times because the material was so compelling.”
—Jeffrey James Keyes
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Derek Trumbo and Agustín Lopez, “Tasked to Dream”
“Agustín led me to believe that my words mattered. He made me seek out new ways to express myself. He made me take pride in the way that I presented my words. In order to be heard, I’d need to do more than just open the proverbial wound and spill my anguish onto the page. Everyone could do that, to the point of oversaturation.”
—Derek Trumbo
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“The accumulation of [Derek’s] talents invites the reader to jump into Derek’s world—though ‘world’ seems like such a narrow description; Derek’s universe is more accurate. There are so many ideas Derek wants to explore, and he always finds an effective way to express them, which I believe is the mark of a true artist.”
—Agustín Lopez
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Seth Wittner and Katrinka (Kei) Moore, “Enthusiasm is Catching”
“Kei has always been open and personal with me, telling me in her introductory letter that she is a poet—not a novelist or author of short stories—but that she is an avid reader and would be able to provide me with good feedback on my fiction. She said that she would understand if I wanted a different kind of writer. I knew then that there was no other mentor I would rather have.”
—Seth Wittner
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“His enthusiasm is catching. Seth and I are united in our belief about the power of writing. Through writing, we listen to each other. I listen to the world he’s created in his novel, and he listens to my ideas about his manuscript, about writing itself. We trust each other to listen, and we trust each other to be serious about the creative process.”
—Katrinka (Kei) Moore
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About the PEN America Prison Writing Mentorship Program
Consisting of more than 300 mentors working with some 300 imprisoned writers, the PEN America Prison Writing Mentorship Program is the country’s leading writerly connection between writers inside and outside the walls of U.S. prisons. Mentors provide constructive criticism, notes on craft, and guidance in and beyond the fundamentals of writing, grammar, and mechanics to incarcerated people across the country.