2023 PEN America Prison Writing Contest Winners Announced
Robert Pollock, program manager for the Prison and Justice Writing program, said: “The extraordinary quality of the writing and their subject matter are evident in the judges’ choices. That… More
Turning Sentences Around
In this Works of Justice exclusive, Robert Lee Williams reflects on how PEN America's "The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer's Life in Prison" (Haymarket Books, 2022) helped… More
On Bridgeworks Oregon’s “Prisons Have a Long Memory: Life Inside Oregon’s Oldest Prison”
Moira Marquis reviews Tracy D. Schlapp and Danny Wilson's "Prisons Have a Long Memory: Life Inside Oregon's Oldest Prison" (Bridgeworks Oregon, 2022). More
Zhigwaajige’
“My mother then explained that the government had run a mass campaign and sterilized Indian people, and that one of the ways to do this was to label anyone… More
Why I Write
“I write because I have always written, because I want to write, because I don't want to write, because I don't know how to not write. Because, in the… More
Injuries Incompatible with Life
“This is my number, bro. Go to a meeting, get clean, and call me up sometime soon. I need a third baseman for our softball team, and you look… More
Tarkovsky by Countlight
“While in such a state, I had often pictured myself as some performance artist at the Guggenheim or somewhere: bleak, three-walled void of cell, its lotused, blanket-swaddled habitant.” More
Raw, Real, Uncensored
“The greatest consolation is that at the instant of death, all that was life ceases to matter; however good or bad, all the events of that life suddenly become… More
Little Gardens
“The older I get the more constricting I find the hetero mask to be. Committing this to paper is, then, something of a coming-out party.” More
The Path to Remembering
“I realized I wanted to write for women like me, women who want to read stories about dark, black ingenues; women who want to remember how ancient and divine… More
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