The PEN America Prison Writing Program commissioned currently incarcerated writers, of whom Arthur Longworth was one, to reflect on the tensions between the realm of public readership and the often hidden creative life in prison for the 2019 World Voices Festival.
Works of Justice: On Writing in Prison
The Prison Writing Program commissioned currently incarcerated writers to reflect on the hidden creative life in prison for the 2019 World Voices Festival.
Watch actor Jon Sands read Longworth’s “The Railroad” in New York. The piece discusses how fraught writing in prison can be, and how difficult it is for prison stories to make it out to the free world. As Longworth writes, “Ever piece of writing the prison has confiscated from me prosecutes a fundamental tenet of prison in the US, particularly the peculiarly American institution of mass incarceration. That is, the pathological and historically embedded idea that prisoners are not to have control of any facet of the institution, including narration of their own context or experience within it.”
This reading is especially resonant when considering recent bans on printed words entering the prison much less escaping.
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