As I sat down with students during study hall at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, I listened and read through the minds, hearts, and imaginations of burgeoning writers — each carrying a unique voice, a distinctive dream. I asked them about their goals and what they hoped to learn from my publishing workshop. “How to withstand rejection,” one told me. “How to get your work noticed,” another described. “How to market my work to audiences,” another outlined. As I listened, I took careful notes. I wanted my workshop to provide encouragement to each student to continue to read and write. I wasn’t there to teach what I knew; I was there to listen and teach the students what they wanted to learn. 

From that meeting with the students, I edited my publishing toolkit — a 90-page collection of resources including literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and publishing houses that seek work from incarcerated writers. In it, I describe how to navigate the complexity of the publishing process; from writing a bio and cover letter to withstanding rejection to understanding copyright, the toolkit explains all aspects of how to get a written piece out into the world. Through teaching students about the publishing process, the toolkit aims to empower incarcerated writers to tell their stories, encouraging them to live far and wide. 

I also led my workshop at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center.  The students participated with enthusiasm, listening with attentiveness and partaking in the writing exercises peppered throughout with curiosity and depth. Reading and writing garners students with critical thinking skills; further, students have agency over their words and notebook pages. For brief moments during the workshop, I saw the students finding the courage to present themselves unbarred, sharing honest stories and critical analysis.  “I write to express what goes on inside,” one student vocalized during an exercise. “To articulate my inner world, but also to articulate this inner world — of navigating and living within the prison-industrial complex.” 

In engaging with the stories of the students, and the ever-evolving path of the Prison Education Project, I wrote a new chapter of my life — one in which I found a passion for teaching and advancing socio-economic opportunity in an environment alongside others who are excited about the work. Creative writing can be used as a tool towards agency and abolition, of imagining a life beyond bars and of re-imagining a nation without bars. A mentor at my undergraduate university once reminded me: “education is liberation.” It wasn’t until my experience with the Prison Education Project that I viscerally understood what they meant.