Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing--A Pen American Center Prize Anthology

How DOING TIME came into being.
Thirty years ago, teaching a college course in prison, I saw how the experience of reading, writing, and thinking had the power for some of my students to transform their sense of themselves and of the world. Those years also changed me, making me question literature’s role in our culture and history and begin to seek to expose my students to a much more inclusive body of American literature.

Then, several years ago, I joined the Prison Writing Program committee of PEN (the writers’ association) which since 1973 has been running a contest for writers in U.S. prisons, offering prizes in poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama. In the seventies, there was still a wide reading audience for prison writers, but beginning in the eighties, that interest fell off sharply. Ironically, this is just when the prison population began to soar, tripling, quadrupling and finally becoming six times its size in the early 70s. Through all the years PEN continued to sort through thousands of manuscripts and have winning works read or performed at powerfully moving annual ceremonies.

Overwhelmed by the literary power of these works and what they revealed both of deteriorating conditions in prison and of the power of the human spirit to suvive and even grow, I thought they deserved a larger audience. And that, especially now, the public needed to hear from this hidden nation in our midst.

With the help of the PEN prison writing committee, I compiled a collection of the best prize-winning works over this quarter century. Finding the works and their authors and learning their life stories (which are in the book too) was one of the most important and stirring experiences of my life. As teacher and writer, I know that some of us write as if our lives depended on it–but in the case of these writers it is often quite literally true.

It’s gratifying that reviewers too see this writing as a significant branch of American literature. and that so many readers attest that the experience of reading has forever changed the way they think of prisoners.