Breakout: Voices from Inside, A Benefit Reading for PEN American Center’s Prison Writing Program

Join PEN Members and special guests for a reading of award-winning prose and poetry from the PEN Prison Writing Contest. Proceeds from the event help ensure that PEN’s hallmark program continues to promote the restorative and rehabilitative power of writing by providing hundreds of inmates with skilled writing teachers, free Handbooks for Writers in Prison, and a forum where inmates are encouraged to use the written word as a legitimate form of power. With Touré, Bryonn Bain, Staceyann Chin, Nick Flynn, Lili Taylor, and others

If you can’t attend, please sponsor an MFA writing student to go in your place!

This event will feature a special reading of poems and prose by incarcerated men and women from prisons that include: El Paso, Texas; Florence, Colorado; Ft Leavenworth, Kansas; Honolulu, Hawaii; Lexington, Kentucky; Montgomery, Alabama; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Ossining, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Riker’s Island, New York; Sacramento, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; San Diego, California; Seattle, Washington; Tallahassee, Florida; Terre Haute, Indiana; Tucson, Arizona, and Washington, DC.

In 2012, PEN’s Prison Writing Program:

• Distributed more than 8,000 copies of the PEN Handbook for Writers in Prison free of charge to men and women serving sentences throughout the United States.
• Connected over 100 mentors with writers in prison for one-on-one instruction
• Judged over 1,500 manuscripts in our Prison Writing Contest.
• Reprinted an Anthology Doing Time, with a new forward.

at The Strand Bookstore’s Rare Book Room