GUEST EDITOR - AMERICAN PEN

Selected winners of the PEN Prison Writing Awards appeared in The Muse Apprentice Guild Mini-Mag, January 2004. Many of my thoughts on working with this program appear there, and I'm hoping not to repeat myself. But that's easy, since the lives of those incarcerated in American prisons have attracted national attention in the news media over the past year, and public awareness of writers in prison seems to be increasing even as I write this.

To begin with, The Exonerated (based on interviews with six death row inmates later found innocent) opened on off-Broadway in late 2002, with various well-known actors and actresses stepping into the roles. Other productions toured the country and, ironically, it has now been turned into a Court TV movie. Then, in 2004, Barbara Parsons Lane won the prestigious $25,000 PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award.

To retrace the steps leading to this award: Connecticut author Wally Lamb was invited into the York Correctional Institution after there was a rash of suicides and suicide attempts. He talked with the inmates about writing as a way of coping with despair and frustration. This one-time commitment led to a regular writing group which Lamb co-facilitates with prison teacher Dale Griffith. Out of this workshop grew a volume of essays written by eight female inmates: Couldn't Keep It To Myself: Testimonies from our Imprisoned Sisters (edited by Lamb and prefaced with his moving introduction). Before the authors received their first royalty checks, Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal invoked the state’s vaguely worded and very selectively applied cost-of-incarceration law and billed the contributors at the rate of $117 a day. The prison also cancelled the workshops, denied access to the computers, and erased all the writing by people in the group. This is when the PEN American Center stepped in.

In December 2003, Prison Writing Program chair Bell Chevigny encouraged Wally Lamb to nominate a contributor for PEN Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. Lamb selected Barbara Parsons Lane, impressed by her own growth and achievement, and feeling she best represented the other writers in the volume.

Thanks largely to the negative publicity attracted by the Award, the money from royalties was returned to the prisoners and the writing workshop was reinstated. Erased data was retrieved from the computers. Last December, Lane also won her parole.

This is certainly a high-profile case. But no one working with the PEN Prison Writing Committee was in the least surprised by the excellent quality of Lane's writing. Over the years, the Prison Writing Committee has been reading manuscripts that we feel display craft, vision, and an overall excellence. Each year we receive entries from familiar names, and the winners presented here are no exception: J. C. Amberchele has won in both fiction and nonfiction; his novel, How You Lose, was published in 2003 by Carroll and Graf. Jorge Antonio Renaud has won in several categories. William Van Poyck's second book, A Checkered Past, was awarded first place in the 11th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards, while the author sits on Florida's death row. In 2004, Van Poyck was awarded the Fielding Dawson Citation for Outstanding Achievement.

Fielding Dawson (1930-2002) was the heart behind the PEN Prison Writing Committee as it is today, helping to rescue it from near-oblivion in the late 1980s. After his untimely death, the Committee established awards bearing his name: Fielding Dawson New Voices awards in each category (represented here by Yvette Louisell's "The Glove Compartment"), the Fielding Dawson Citation for Outstanding Achievement, and the "Fielding Dawson Citation for a Body of Work" (won in 2004 by David Wood, whose work is unfortunately not reprinted here).

These honors are extremely appropriate. Fielding was the person encouraging everyone else on the committee to look not just at a writer's polished piece, but at its potential, and his enthusiasm was contagious. While the citations for "Outstanding Achievement" and "Body of Work" should be self-explanatory, my guess is that many writers who have received them in the past, or will receive them in the future, were directly or indirectly encouraged by Fielding's interest and generosity.

Winner or not, the PEN Prison Writing Program gets an incredible number of letters each year from prisoners who tell us that writing is what keeps them going: it gives them the vehicle to make sense of the past, and develop hope for the future. In the program for the 2004 awards ceremony, William Van Poyck is quoted: “Writing is my inoculation against despair, permitting me to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.”

Besides the contest itself, the Prison Writing Program produces a frequently updated handbook on writing, including lessons and examples as well as possible markets for work, which is sent free of charge to all prisoners who request it. Another publication is Words Over Walls: Starting A Writing Workshop In Prison, written by Janine Pommy Vega and former Prison Writing Program chair Hettie Jones. We also offer mentoring to contest runners up and others who show real potential. And we recently began sponsoring post-release workshops. Finally, there are some names that have been missing from our winners circle over the past few years. Many of my favorite writings have been by Charles Culhane, Susan Rosenberg, Eric Waters, Judee Norton, and Kathy Boudin – all of whom are out of prison now and doing useful work in the community at large.

curtis l easley
g t carrillo
gary hicks
j c amberchele
jack vian
james burns
john byron yarbrough
jorge antonio renaud
jose boner
joshua nicholas hill
malcolm king
mario vincent perez
mark smith
paul a moran
scott walt
spoon jackson
steve a champion
william van poyck
yvette louisell