On Wednesday, Nov. 6, students and faculty gathered at the Humanities building at Stony Brook University to celebrate the launch of “Writing Beyond the Prison,” a collective digital project that hosts over 100 writings from incarcerated authors, poets and activists. The project includes a “Living Archive:” a source in collaboration with the Stony Brook University Libraries that protects and preserves the manuscripts of incarcerated people across the country and allows users to access their stories. 

The site imagines itself as a constellation, with the writings categorized within their own universes, as seen on the website’s home page. This project was organized by Erika Duncan, the founder and artistic director of the Herstory Writers Network and Ivan Kilgore, an incarcerated author and the founder of the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation and their teams.  

The event began with a brief introduction by Robert Chase, an associate professor in the Department of History, about other contributors to the project, including Susan Scheckel, an associate professor in the Department of English and Zebulon Vance Miletsky, an associate professor in the Department of Africana Studies. 

“If this nation can elect a convicted felon, surely we can take people who were formerly incarcerated and allow them to have jobs, allow them to have redemption, allow them to rent apartments or to vote or to go to college,” Chase said. “All things that are incredibly difficult for an incarcerated person to do, because they must first be known as a formerly incarcerated person, which excludes them from all of those things.” 

Throughout the evening, poems were read out loud by graduate students by some of the incarcerated authors who participated in the archive. 

Chase spoke about the vision for this project, explaining that writing involves stages of creation, conceptualization, organization, expression, reflection and self realization. This is why for incarcerated people who are confined within the cell walls, writing is their way of being able to escape and transform themselves. 

“So we [collaborators] thought then, when shared with the wider world, this [incarcerated peoples’ writings] moves from individual consciousness and self expression to become a communal exchange,” Chase said. 

Miletsky spoke next about the website and the process of gathering incarcerated people to start writing through dialogue between each other. Authors like Kilgore would go and have conversations with other incarcerated people to encourage them to pick up the pen and share their stories, allowing them to flourish as writers over time. 

Scheckel was the next speaker of the event. She introduced Duncan and the work around Herstory Beyond Bars, which is an online curriculum designed to give incarcerated people a voice through personal narratives. 

“I want to say, in introducing this pedagogy, it’s really based on three very simple things, and it’s the question, ‘If your words had the power to change a heart, a mind or a policy, what would they say?’” Duncan said. Duncan shared some of the responses of incarcerated people to that question, ranging from wanting to change policy on immigration to eradicating racism, injustice and hatred. 

Lawrence Bartley, the publisher of the Marshall Project Inside and the founder and director of News Inside, was the keynote speaker of the event. The Marshall Project Inside is a non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers criminal justice nationally and is aimed towards incarcerated audiences, with News Inside as its printed publication. 

He detailed the inspiration behind Inside Story, a video series based on the stories from the Marshall Project. He explained that since 70% of incarcerated people cannot read or write at the fourth-grade level, they may be unable to read the news content. As a result, Inside Story was born to meet that need. The pieces in this publication helps prisoners to access information that may be helpful for their release or allow them to have an in-depth understanding of the criminal justice system. 

“To me, both of the products [Marshall Project and Inside Story] are special, because many times incarcerated people are subjects of news stories, but news outlets don’t dedicate their reporting to working for incarcerated people,” Bartley said. 

Bartley also spoke about the Prison Journalism Project, of which he is a board member. The Prison Journalism Project releases articles from incarcerated people, including investigative pieces and criminal justice work being done. It also has a program built to teach incarcerated people how to be journalists. 

“The Prison Journalism Project gives incarcerated people the power to tackle issues themselves by getting those stories out there,” Bartley said. 

Bartley turned attention to Empowerment Avenue, a program whose goal is to connect with writers and get them published in publications like The New York Times and Business Insider. They have 37 writers across 14 states in 18 prisons that write about 20 articles monthly. These writers are paid, despite it being difficult for incarcerated people to get money. 

Some of the articles that are a part of News Inside are also in Life Inside, which is a series of essays The Marshall Project publishes weekly that focuses specifically on incarcerated peoples’ experiences in the criminal justice system. 

The goals of projects and publications like “Writing Beyond the Prison” and The Marshall Project is to encourage incarcerated people to have the resources and platform in order to build up their writing skills and bring attention to their stories. Working on these skills allows them to earn money outside of meager wages of a couple cents an hour they may earn in prison. Once incarcerated people get released from prison, these initiatives can allow them gain success and opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t be privy to. 

“The goal is to normalize incarcerated people now being in a space where they can share their narratives and be creative; they can be reporters, etc., so you have the skills when you get home to be successful,” Bartley said. 

The event ended with a question-and-answer session, wherein Kilgore was called from prison. When asked why he chose writing as an intellectual journey and what it has brought him, Kilgore said writing was a form of self-preservation and a sense of freedom of expression. 

“I didn’t really choose writing … Really, it chose me,” Kilgore said.