Breakout: Voices from Inside

With Jackson Taylor, Randall Horton, Ayana Mathis, Deborah Clearman, Susan Rosenberg, Gregory de la Haba, Karen Good Marable, Timothy Small, Eric Boyd, Yasmine Lancaster.

PEN Members and special guests gathered together on February 27th to celebrate the award-winning prose and poetry from the 2014 PEN Prison Writing Contest.

PEN’s hallmark program continues to promote the restorative and rehabilitative power of writing by providing hundreds of inmates with skilled writing teachers, free Handbooks for Writers in Prison, and a forum where inmates are encouraged to use the written word as a legitimate form of power.

The event featured a special reading of poems and prose by men and women incarcerated around the country. Click below to read their entries. 

“An Ordinary Prison” by Elizabeth Haysom (Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, Troy, VA)

“Cultivation” by Christopher Griffin (Texas Department Criminal Justice, W.F. Ramsey Unit, Rosharon, TX)

“Midnight at the Manatee” by Joe Rickey Knight (Roederer Correctional Complex, LaGrange, KY)

“Echoes” by Brian Maddock (Arizona State Prison Complex, Tuscon, AZ)

“Betrayal-Past-Tony” by Samantha Abeyllez (Riker’s Island Correctional Facility, East Elmhurst, NY)

“Mentorship Correspondence” between John T. and Louis L. (Salinas Valley State Prison, Soledad, CA)

“About the Family Down the Road” by Patricia Prewitt (Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center, Vandalia, MO)

“UN Plaza” by Andrew Jaicks (Residential Reentry Management, Phoenix, AZ)

“Death by Dominoes” by William Van Poyck (executed at Florida State Prison)

“Air Pressure” by Christopher Presfield (High Desert State Prison, Susanville, CA)