Writing for Justice Fellowship 2021-2022

Columbus, OH

Starr Davis will work on HUSSLE, a memoir essay collection that examines the personal, political, and spiritual implications of growing up as a young Black woman with an incarcerated parent, embedded in a Midwest landscape crippled by mass incarceration.

Davis will be working with writer Reginald Dwayne Betts.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Napanoch, NY

P.M. Dunne will create a multimedia project that merges poetic verse with dance, emphasizing the need for prison art programs with merit-based incentives such as community engagement and early release.

Dunne will be working with choreographer Sarah Dahnke.

Tujunga, CA

Elizabeth Flock will write a magazine piece that exposes the criminalization of sex workers and trafficked women who kill in self-defense, driven by three central stories of justice-involved women and bolstered by in-depth research on self-defense law as it relates to rape, abuse, and trafficking.

Flock will be working with journalist Rachel Aviv.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

New York, NY

Caleb Gayle will write a longform essay about how prison gerrymandering manipulates electoral power—increasing the strength of white rural communities, while compounding the marginalization of communities of color—through a central narrative of multigenerational incarceration in a Black family.

Gayle will be working with writer Kiese Laymon.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

San Quentin, CA

Juan Moreno Haines, an incarcerated journalist and survivor of COVID-19, will write a longform journalism piece analyzing San Quentin State Prison officials’ lack of adequate response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, which caused the death of 28 incarcerated people and a correctional sergeant.

Haines will be working with journalist and editor Bill Keller.

Highland Park, NJ

Aron Pines will expose the harrowing judicial process for youth offenders sentenced as adults through the completion of his coming-of-age memoir, The Miseducation of Icarus, which follows the 21-year-old author as he prepares to represent himself at trial, facing not only the jury but his own personal reckoning.

Pines will be working with novelist Ryan Gattis.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Washington, D.C.

Citlali Pizarro will work on an in-depth journalistic examination of carceral California’s history of forced sterilizations—from 20th-century eugenics, to the illegal sterilizations of incarcerated women in the 2000s—interrogating the ways confinement violates reproductive autonomy by design.

Pizarro will be working with investigative journalist Jordan Smith.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Florida City, FL

Leonard Scovens, tapping into his personal experience with restorative and holistic justice—and rounding out his book project American Penitentiary—will write a series of essays exploring how cultural accountability and forgiveness are critical components of ending mass incarceration, and necessary for healing the historical traumas of slavery and genocide at its root.

Scovens will be working with journalist Nicole Lewis.

Grand Rapids, MI

Clarice Thomas will complete a nonfiction book project, Writing Home, which identifies the societal factors that implicate prison as an inevitable life course for African Americans through a firsthand account of multigenerational incarceration of father and son—the author’s grandfather and uncle.

Thomas will be working with editor zakia henderson-brown.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

New York, NY

Sarah Wang will work on a series of lyric essays that utilize reporting, poetry, and cultural criticism to explore the often contradictory and capricious nature of bearing witness to mass incarceration as a survivor of domestic violence in the era of abolition and #MeToo.

Wang will be working with law professor Jyoti Nanda.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan