The Department of English is advancing the educational work in the prison system by bringing reading and writing of English to those who may benefit greatly from it.
About the Program
In the 1980s, Professor Richard Shelton began teaching creative-writing workshops in Arizona prisons. Shelton wrote about his experiences in his memoir, Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer. Later with support from a Lannon Foundation grant to the UA Poetry Center, Shelton founded Rain Shadow Review, a journal featuring literary work by incarcerated writers.
In the mid 2010s, Professor Erec Toso continued Shelton’s work by conducting creative-writing workshops for incarcerated individuals. He also taught a UA undergraduate course on prison writing where students studied the history of American prison writing, met established prison writers, and read and edited work for publication.
In 2017, the Prison Education Project was launched as an initiative of the Department of English to teach in the local state prison system. This project was seeded with support from Barbara Martinson, a friend of our department with a passion for advancing educational work in the prison system.
The project officially launched in Spring 2017 when a team of faculty and RCTE graduate students, led by Professor Marcia Klotz, team-taught a non-credit reading course at the Whetstone Unit in the Arizona State Prison Complex-Tucson. Several of the student participants were veterans in the Whetstone Prison's Regaining Honor unit, so the theme of honor was central to that first course. Instructors taught the close-reading of essays, short stories and poems to help ready incarcerated students for college-level work. Students improved their critical reading and comprehension skills, gained rhetorical awareness, and engaged the readings in order to reflect on their lives and hopes for the future. Some students in the initial class took the initiative to publish a prison newspaper. Whetstone Whirl began publication in fall 2017. Staffed at the outset by volunteers and published every other month, the newspaper grew to a monthly publication with a staff of 7 workers.
The project expanded in Spring 2018 to include a broad-based faculty speaker series open to all interested inmates on a wide range of topics including: "The most important musical event. Ever", "The Hidden Language of Art", and "What Does Elephant Trauma Have to do with Humans?". An ESL course for incarcerated individuals to learn English as an additional language was also launched, taught by MATESL graduate students.
The Pandemic ended the PEP temporarily, but some funding has gone to support to Anthropology Professor Linda Green’s Inside Out project as well.
In 2027 the PEP project will be reinvigorated with a new course to be taught in 2027 by Professor Sylvia Chan. More information on the project is forthcoming.
Getting Involved
If you would like to support our work, please consider contributing to the Prison Education Fund at the UA Foundation.
