For the American Prison Writing Archive, a ‘Shadow Canon’ Sheds Light
The New York Times, April 17, 2023: For the American Prison Writing Archive, a ‘Shadow Canon’ Sheds Light
“…Di Lenola’s work is one of more than 3,300 first-person narratives that make up the American Prison Writing Archive, the country’s most extensive digital repository of writings about life and conditions inside some 400 correctional facilities in 47 states. Earlier this month, the archive transferred from its original home at Hamilton College to the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University. Buoyed by a $2.3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the archive plans to increase the number of digitized first-person accounts to more than 10,000, start a book series, launch exhibitions and create a kind of digital umbrella linking to kindred open-access efforts like the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing program and the Reveal Digital American Prison Newspaper collection.
“The sheer volume of work ‘can feel like beans in a jar,’ said Vesla Mae Weaver, the archive’s co-director and a professor of political science and sociology at Johns Hopkins. ‘But when you go through them one by one by one, they raise complex and genuine questions like “What is the meaning of punishment?” and “What is freedom?”’
“The archive evolved out of a writing class taught for 11 years by Doran Larson, a Hamilton literature and creative writing professor, at the Attica Correctional Facility, best known for the bloody 1971 prison revolt in which New York State Police killed 39 prisoners and 10 state employees and seriously wounded scores of others. It didn’t take Larson long to realize that, in writing honestly about what they were witnessing and experiencing inside, his students were ‘producing documents that the world really needed to see,’ he said.”
Additional reading:
Transformative In-Prison Workgroup
University of Michigan: Carceral State Project
