The National Book Foundation, in partnership with Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop and Public Welfare Foundation, hosted the conclusion to a three-year “Literature for Justice” program that curates an annual reading list on the complex issue of mass incarceration. Free Minds Book Club distributed the chosen books to incarcerated people in the DC Jail and to federal prisons all over the country: City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernandez; Ossuaries by Dionne Brand; Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement by Albert Woodfox; No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley; Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood; and Assata: an Autobiography by Assata Shakur. Free Minds members participated in an Assata book club, and wrote in questions for the author panel in time for the event. Members had insightful comments and questions about the book and for the author, including:
- Antyone: What does this phrase mean to you: ”He who runs when the sun is sleeping, will stumble many times”?
- Saulina: I would like to express my gratitude for having the opportunity to read Assata. Her journey felt very close to home and reminded me of the many struggles I felt growing up that contributed to some of my wrong turns. The book was amazing. I absolutely loved it!
- Leonard: Everyone knows Assata Shakur as the revolutionary. Who is Assata Shakur, the person?
The event was organized into two parts: the first part featured the different scholars, activists, and authors on the committee that chose the reading list, and the second part was a panel of the book authors themselves. The selection committee included author Susan Burton, poet Natalie Diaz of “Postcolonial Love Poem,” Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. of Princeton’s African-American Studies Program, prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba (who was unfortunately unable to attend), and author Piper Kerman of Orange is the New Black. The moderator of the event was another Princeton AAS professor, Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
The second half of the event included a short panel discussion by each of the awarded authors; the panel’s closing comments were prompted from the Free Minds members’ questions: How can we move from reading to revolution, and how do we as African-Americans change the narrative of our own stories?
Kelly Lytle Hernandez (City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965) emphasized the importance of book clubs and studying together! Alongside her work as a professor, she has formed a commission in her community where they report on conditions in local jails.
Dionne Brand (Ossuaries) talked about the importance of visionary poetry and writing. “We are thinking our way out of this and into that future,” she said, and of the narrator in her own book of poems, she said, “The speaker hopes that the story that we are living now will be forgotten in that future.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California), a longtime prison abolitionist and academic, had a lot of critiques of the prison industrial complex. In her book, she explains the concept of prison as the foundation of “the ‘anti-state’ state: where during a crisis, the federal government printed billions of dollars to save banks and corporations instead of people.” She was also very optimistic about our power as a collective, however. She talked about the process of working towards abolition as “life in rehearsal,” and that moving from “reading to revolution is reading to rehearse the abolition geography. The pieces of mass incarceration are the raw material that we can use to build something else!”
Albert Woodfox (Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope) talked about surviving solitary confinement for 45 years, and how the journey taught him a great deal about the power of the human spirit. In terms of reading to revolution, Mr. Woodfox said “my mom was my first hero — who encouraged me to make the sacrifice to start educating other men that I lived around.”
