Women, Writing, and Prison Activists, Scholars, and Writers Speak Out [Hardcover]

This powerful volume is the best possible portal for approaching the vital impact of the word in the context of incarceration.? The voices of advocates, activists, academicsand, most brilliantly, the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated womendeploy astonishing and effective languages of clarity, truth, and justice.? The rational passion on these pages is startling and unforgettable.This book provides glimpses of prison life that most of us would not otherwise know. As the women write, thoughts guarded so closely come spilling out upon the page. They invite us into their worlds to see them as human beings with human issues they are trying to resolve. I was moved by the beauty of their poetry and the poignancy of their life stories.These writings undermine the very foundation of our nightmarish and shameful prison system. Like crews boring a tunnel from opposite ends, the writers from inside and outside meet in the middle with affirmations of life and humanity that offer a potent antidote to the deathly cruelties of the American gulag. And because the vast majority of women prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent crimes of poverty, this volume exposes the fundamental assumptions of the American criminal justice system as instruments of brutal class control.A moving, sometimes unsettling, account of women caught within the prison industrial complex. Weaving together the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, community activists, and academics, this innovative anthology reminds us why writing matters.Women, Writing & Prison?is the deepest and most helpful book Ive read about teaching the arts inside prison walls. The authors tackle the complex challenges of working within a criminal justice system that by its very nature brutalizes those who are locked into it.?The womens stories, and those of the teachers/activists who work with them, remind us that writing is a pathway to freedom withina practice that affirms our humanity ló&