PEN America has been promoting literature and freedom of expression for over a century. Late last year, the U.S.-based organization launched a new program to help incarcerated writers across the country overcome barriers to become published authors.
“ The idea is to create more opportunities for incarcerated writers… to create more equity in the literary and publishing communities,” Malcolm Tariq, the chief project manager for PEN America’s newly created Incarcerated Writers Bureau, told WLRN.
In South Florida, Kathie Klarreich, executive director of the nonprofit educational organization Exchange for Change, has been elevating the voices of incarcerated writers for years.
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“ Education is a human right. When we convict someone, the punishment really is that we have removed them from society so they can no longer enjoy all the freedoms that we have out here,” she said. “If we don't spend that time educating them… we're failing ourselves as a community.”
Research from the American Journal of Criminal Justice shows that education in prison decreases the probability of recidivism by almost 15% against the average national recidivism rate of 46%.
Klarreich founded Exchange for Change in South Florida in 2014. Since then, she says that more than half a dozen students have won PEN Prison Writing Awards — which some consider to be the most prestigious award in prison writing.
What started with one writing class over a decade ago has now expanded to dozens of college level courses across seven South Florida prisons that help incarcerated people reshape their lives through writing.
Although not every person who works with Exchange for Change or PEN America when incarcerated will go on to become a full-time professional writer, it gives them an opportunity to go on and be more successful members of society.
"Be greater than the walls penning you in.
Dream bigger than you deserve to.
Respect the spirit of those who sacrificed it all
so you could have the privilege of being human."Excerpt of "Jewels" by P.M. Dunne
Peter Dunne was only 22 years old when he was sentenced to 18 years in prison after taking the life of someone he had a personal relationship with. After years of abusing drugs he found himself in a position he still hasn’t found a way to write about.
“ I allude to it in my poetry,” he said. “ I think it is worthy of being written about, but I just haven't found a way to do it in a way that is respectful to the victim but also honest.”
Dunne, who goes by “P.M.” — his nom de plume — said that early on in his prison sentence in New York he learned that it shouldn’t appear as if you are "profiting" off the nature of your crime. He didn’t see a way he could profit off that horrible time.
During his 16-year prison stint, Dunne learned firsthand the hurdles facing writers in prison. He recalls one time when he lost an opportunity to be published in the New York Times because he was in “the hole” when he received a response from the national media outlet to one of his essays.
He said even printing his work required a painstaking process: deftly sliding one sheet of paper at a time from a printer stored in a black metal cage.
Dunne persevered, winning his first writing award while incarcerated in 2017 when he came in second place in the fiction category of PEN America's Prison Writing Contest for a short story he wrote titled “An Ungodly Godlike Man.”
In 2020, while at Eastern Correctional Facility, Dunne’s memoir of “The Anti-Social Social Club” would go on to win a first place PEN Prison Writing Award. He would then become a recipient of the PEN Writing for Justice Fellowship.
Dunne is now on parole and works for PEN America as an editorial consultant in New York.
When Tariq first started as an editorial manager at PEN America, much of his time would be spent trying to edit stories under extremely strict guidelines.
“ I[‘d] have to figure out a way to signal my edit to them… either that's in parentheses or in all caps… sometimes I'll write notes and then do examples of what I'm talking about,” Tariq explained because prison emailing systems wouldn’t allow any formatting.
He said depending on the state, each email would cost somewhere between 5 to 10 cents each way. In Florida, an email stamp costs $0.39.
A dollar correspondence may mean very little to a media outlet, but a dollar for a prisoner can be the difference between buying soap or food.
Creating clear guidelines on how incarcerated writers can submit their work, providing ways to submit that don’t require computer access (like the widely used Submittable does) by opening a P.O. Box, and becoming familiar with the costs and restrictions of communication can go a long way.
For many on the inside, becoming a better writer isn’t just a career opportunity but a way to express themselves in manners they hadn’t or couldn’t before.
The prominent Washington, D.C. -based think tank New America reports in an analysis of U.S. education data that "only 15 percent of incarcerated adults earn a postsecondary degree or certificate either prior to or during incarceration, while almost half (45%) of the general public have completed some form of postsecondary education."
Michael Anguille was a professional journalist and Florida Atlantic University graduate when he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a DUI conviction involving a crash that left a woman paralyzed.
“ I'm lucky that I had a good educational foundation before I went in,” he said. “I had a good moral foundation. My parents: bless 'em. I was really able to step back and take a look, like and say, ‘what do you have to do?’”
Late in Anguille’s prison sentence while at Everglades Correctional in South Florida, he discovered Exchange for Change and was able to do something familiar to him: be published. Exchange for Change no longer publishes the journal Anguille was featured in, but he said that for others who hadn’t been published before, being recognized in that way was a huge deal.
Today, Anguille is a law student and co-founder of the Stillwater Awards that recognizes prison journalists.
“ Even though prison is a very structured environment, this gives you intellectual structure,” he said. “It's a positive activity. It gives you a reason to think, to use your mind productively.”
Programs like Exchange for Change and PEN America’s Incarcerated Writer’s Bureau highlights the progress that just a handful of people can make against a system that is trying to remedy decades of incarceration without true rehabilitation.
Most incarcerated people (at least 95%) will be released according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
As PM said: “ What we do as incarcerated individuals… that sets the stage for what we're gonna do when we get out. So it's only to society's benefit to encourage people pursuing positive things while they're inside, because eventually they're gonna get out.”
