American Prison Writing Archive

10/12/2026

Got some time to spare? Want to connect with incarcerated writers? We’re looking for folx in and around Baltimore to help us send the Archive into prisons across the US. Sign up at the link in our bio.

10/07/2026

We’re excited to amplify this new call for submissions and call for volunteer editors posted by our archival partner Writing Beyond The Prison (WBP)! WBP seeks to publish novels, short stories, poetry, essays, TV screenplays, and film scripts to become part of the Writing Beyond the Prison Archive, hosted by Stony Brook University, helping to preserve the intellectual and creative record of people affected by incarceration. WBP’s goal is to publish 30 manuscripts & 10 scripts. Selected works may receive editorial mentorship, editing and proofreading, typesetting and publication preparation, digital archival preservation, public humanities programming, and future publication and media opportunities.



For more information and submission guidelines, contact:
USC Readers’ Circle
ATTN: Writing Beyond the Prison
950 W. Jefferson Blvd, JEF 150
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1293
Email: [email protected]

For more information about volunteer editing, email: [email protected] or scan the QR Code.

10/02/2026

We’re stoked to share the latest Community School offerings from our archival partners, the After Violence Project (AVP)! Four courses, taught by AVP’s very own staff, on what it takes to steward community archives:

🗄️ Storytelling through the Archive
💸 Exploring Earned Revenue for Community Archives
🍎 Pedagogy as Practice
💻 Risk & Protection for Community Archives

Classes begin the week of 10/19. Sign up today to secure your spot. After Violence Project

What’s Community School?
AVP’s continuing education initiative offering courses on the practices of stewarding community archives. Stewarding collective memory well takes a range of skills, and no one person has them all, so we share insights as an organization nearly two decades deep into this work. Instructors draw on interdisciplinary approaches and lived experience as practitioners, who have worked under changing conditions in community-sensitive environments.

💰 Want to support? Consider donating toward student gift cards to support students who can’t otherwise attend.

🔗 Learn more via link in bio!

10/01/2026

Welcome October! With the start of a new month, it’s only right we shout out the last one. The APWA left September completely cooked!

1-5. The APWA held our first ever in-person Strategic Planning Retreat. Team members presented on the strengths, obstacles, and opportunities of their work in order to envision the Archive’s future. Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Professor and APWA Co-Director Vesla Mae Weaver and APWA Founder and Co-Director Doran Larson led the team through a few APWA Future Envisioning sessions during our retreat.

6-7. Harm & Punishment Co-Editors, Elizabeth Hinton (Yale University and Justice 4 Everybody Movement founding director) and Elsa Julien Lora (Harvard University), led a discussion at Johns Hopkins University’s Chloe Center around their work with this seminal anthology.

8-10. Team APWA’s Managing Director Nicole Shawan Junior, Archivist Zach Utz, and Writing Coordinator Matty Rihn, led “From Risk to Repository: Archiving First-Person Narratives of Incarceration at the Bmore Historic Unconference, held at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Conversation around the risks inherent in archiving first-witness prison narratives, from author to archive, was abound. APWA Associate Manager Hannah Young captured this photo and lent her expertise to the conversation at key moments.

11-12. Harm & Punishment co-editor Elizabeth Hinton, contributor Uhuru Rowe, and APWA Co-Director Vesla Mae Weaver had a robust conversation about the anthology and what folks on the outside can do to support incarcerated authors at Red Emma’s.

October, we can’t wait for what you’ll bring!

ABOUT THE AMERICAN PRISON WRITING ARCHIVE (APWA)
Housed at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, the APWA is the largest body of prison writing ever amassed.

americanprisonwritingarchive

09/30/2026

We couldn’t be more grateful to be partners in progress with Uhuru Baraka Rowe Elizabeth Kai and Vesla Weaver. Thanks Red Emma's for creating space to chat about Crime and Punishment, the violences inherent in incarceration, and how folks on the outside can join the movement.

09/15/2026

This Thursday, join us in Baltimore at Red Emma’s for Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora’s Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison. Hinton and Lora, as well as the incarcerated and formerly-imprisoned writers they’ve brought together, start from the premise that it’s not just that the violence of prisons are obscured — it’s that the gruesome conditions behind the walls are often too “emotionally and existentially” challenging to confront head on. And yet these are lived conditions, the “ultimate alternative reality” where the violent fantasies of domination are not only tolerated, but encouraged.

08/24/2026

📣 Big news! The American Prison Writing Archive is proud to announce our new Managing Director: Nicole Shawan Junior! A system-involved writer, literary champion, and advocate, Nicole is ready to work with co-directors Vesla Weaver and Doran Loran to lead us into an even bolder new chapter. To learn more about Nicole, visit the link in our bio.

08/21/2026

We’re thrilled to shine the SPOTLIGHT on APWA Fellows Channel Burnette, Jason Rodriguez, and Adam Roberts, whose works are featured in Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory’s The Notebook V2. To read their works, visit the link in our bio.

08/21/2026

08/18/2026

“Long before I stepped into an AVP [Alternatives to Violence] workshop, I knew what violence could take away...
Violence is a death certificate that says, ‘Parents to distraught to sign.’ Violence is an empty place at a table, a missing face in family photos... Violence is the guttural sound that escpaed my mother’s lips when the judge sentenced me to life. Violence is the lie I told her when I said, ‘I’m okay. It’s going to be all right.’”

—Karter Reed, Harm & Punishment contributor

Harm & Punishment (Haymarket Books) is a collection of essays by incarcerated writers drawn from the American Prison Writing Archive. This anthology sheds a sobering light on carcerality’s role in perpetuating harm. Pick up your copy at the link in our bio, an independent bookstore, bookshop.org, your local library, or anywhere that sells books.

ABOUT THE AMERICAN PRISON WRITING ARCHIVE (APWA)
Housed at Johns Hopkins University, the APWA is the largest body of prison writing ever amassed.