Tobi Jacobi - Women, Writing, and Prison: Activists, Scholars, and Writers Speak Out

Irene C. Baird is an affiliate assistant professor of Education and director of the Penn State Harrisburg Womens Enrichment Center, an institute focused on learning programs for incarcerated women and men as well as other un/underserved urban women. She is author of Unlocking the Cell and Education, Incarceration, and the Marginalization of Women.

Nancy Birkla is a Disability Resource Manager at KCTCS at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Kentucky. Her essay, Three Steps Past the Monkeys was included in Wally Lambs 2003 Couldnt Keep it to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters.

Boudicca Burning is the pen name for this part-time student at Louisiana State University, a performance artist with ArtSpring who considers herself a slave of the Florida Department of Corrections. She enjoys practicing the craft of writing, reading The New Yorker and playing the dulcimer. Her work includes the plays Evidentiary Hearing: The Musical! and Clemency Board Tango. This is her first published essay.

Bell Gale Chevigny is professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and editor of Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison WritingA PEN American Center Prize Anthology. Her published works include The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fullers Life and Writings (rev. ed., 1994), Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America (1986), and the novel Chloe and Olivia (1990).

Judith Clark is a writer held at Bedford Hills Federal Correctional Institution in Bedford Hills, New York. Clark is a longtime participant in prison writing workshops and has published widely, winning PEN poetry prizes in 1993 and 1995. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, IKON, Global City Review, and Aliens at the Border. Clark also teaches prenatal and parenting classes at Bedford and has published essays on the subject in the Prison Journal and Zero to Three.

Joyce Cohen has been incarcerated since 1989. She is an enthusiastic supporter of the ArtSpring and AVP (l to Violence) Programs. She believes they help keep her balanced while allowing her the opportunity to mentor younger women coming into the Florida prison system. She is an avid reader and often escapes the harsh reality of prison life through books. Joyce is parole eligible and continues to fight for her freedom.

Cree is a writer in northern Colorado. She is deeply committed to using writing and her voice as a tool for empowering the women (particularly Native women) to reclaim their experiences and cultural histories.

Crista Decker is a writer in Florida. She sees writing as a strategy for opening doors and seeing hope in the lives of everyone around her.

Dionna Griffin is a performer, writer, playwright, and the director of out-reach and diversity at Second City Improvisation Troupe in Chicago, Illinois. She is also the founder of DMG Freedom. She weaves her experiences with prison with her current activism in creative performance.

Clarinda Harriss is professor emerita of English at Towson University, where she was chair of the department and taught Literature and Prisons, a course for both English and sociology majors that included frequent visits to the Maryland House of Correction for Men. She has worked one-to-one with female prison writers for the past decade; currently she is excerpting Velmarines Story, a 600-page memoir written in prison by Velmarine Szabo, for web publication as Velmarines Page.

Tsehaye G. Hbert is a ritual artist, educator, and cultural activist. She is the founder of Prison, Arts and the Humanities (PATH), and teaches creative writing in its Women Writers Workshop at Cook County Jail and through a distance-learning module at prisons throughout the state of Illinois.

Jessica Hill is an advocate for children and teens of abuse. She is passionate about the journeys she embarks on and is a lover of love.

Wendy W.Hinshaw is an assistant professor in the English Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her articles on the rhetoric of trauma, teaching testimonial literature, and pedagogical approaches to student resistance have appeared in JAC and Transformations, as well as the collection Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts. Her current work investigates how prisoner art and writing shapes and is shaped by the historical, institutional and cultural contexts in which it circulates, and part of this work appears in the collection Practicing Research in Writing Studies. Currently she serves as the Director of Writing Programs for FAU.

Taylor Huey is a writer held at the Carswell Federal Medical Center in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Tobi Jacobi is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University where she teaches writing and literacy classes. Her research focuses on understanding the problems and possibilities of situating womens prison writing workshops as alternative literacy training. She has taught life writing at a county prison in Upstate New York and currently facilitates a womens prison writing project in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Hettie Jones is the author of sixteen books including All Told (2003); How I Became Hettie Jones (1990); Big Star Fallin Mama: Five Women in Black Music (1974); and several books for children. Her fiction, poems, and prose have appeared in Essence, Frontier: A Journal of Women Studies, Hanging Loose, Heresies, IKON, Ploughshares, Village Voice Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, and other periodicals. Her first collection of poems, Drive (1997), received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She coauthored a booklet on facilitated prison writing workshops for the PEN American Center and ran writing workshops at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills.

Tom Kerr is an associate professor of writing at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. His areas of research include rhetorical theory, composition studies, and cultural studies. His advanced writing course initiated his prison letter-writing project in spring 2003. He is currently working on a book project titled Americas Most Maligned: The Rhetorical Foundations of the Prison Industrial Complex.

Kathie Klarreich is an author and career journalist who spent half of the last twenty-five years living in and covering Haiti for radio, television, and print, including NPR, ABC, NBC, TIME and The Christian Science Monitor. She has found unparalleled satisfaction, however, as a writing facilitator in Homestead Correctional Institution, where she has been teaching for the past several years through the prison arts nonprofit organization ArtSpring.

Roshanda Melton was recently released from prison in 2014. She writes: I am born in the wind and raised in the storm, a mother I was even before the baby was born. My story is etched in-between blurred lines, a diamond in the rough with a heart that shines.

Mia spent time in Cook County Jail, Chicago, and is a writer.

Patricia OBrien is an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Jane Addams College of Social Work, teaching practice methods, group work, and practice with women. Her practice background is in working with battered women and their children. Her current scholarship and publications describe the complex and overlapping factors that relate to womens criminal behaviors and the pathways of reentry after incarceration. She is the author of Making It in the Free World: Women in Transition from Prison.