Poet Caits Meissner shares her reimagined book tour, bringing free writing and collaborative reading workshops to spaces of incarceration around the country.

In March 2017, Meredith Starkman and Meghana Telang, in collaboration with Khula Aasman Trust, entered a women's jail in Mumbai, India, to facilitate a drama workshop focused on the foundations of theatre performance. This article records their experience and the hurdles they faced, from unwilling participants to the height of Mumbai's sweltering…

Caits Meissner continues sharing from her reimagined book tour, where she brings poetry workshops and collaborative readings to prisons, jails and reentry programs around the country. [For Part 1, see EJ1138725.]

Through reflection on a longitudinal teaching, devising, and directing experience in a regional prison, as well as subsequent opportunities for collaboration with formerly incarcerated students, this article posits improvisation as a powerful vehicle for inclusivity, pluralism, and humanistic exchange in applied arts settings.

This article utilizes interviews with three teaching artists to interpret their lived experiences of teaching dance classes within New Zealand prisons. Prison environments and prison cultures create a multitude of challenges, such as the physical environment itself, social dynamics and hierarchy, and interaction and relationships with incarcerated…

This project was born with the intention of generating and recording the artistic expression of a group of inmates in module 6 of the Albolote (ES) penitentiary center through the creation of collaborative fanzines. A workshop was created, held once a week for 4 months. Through conceptual proposals and aesthetic tools, each participant in the…

"The Beat Within" is a writing and art program and publication based in San Francisco that gives a voice to incarcerated youth in various locations across the country. This article recounts the experience of the partnership between a community-based learning course at Portland State University and juvenile detention in Multnomah County,…

Since the author started as a guest-teaching artist at California State Prison-Sacramento (CSP-Sac) in 2009, she has seen a dozen or so really talented writers and artists "move away." In this article, she reflects on continuity, discontinuity and artistic space in prison. She makes four observations from the prison art room: (1) The…

It is definitely easier to write about work when things are going well, but it is even more important to write about what happens when things get challenging. The act of writing about the challenging times can be challenging in itself but can also provide invaluable insights into the process of teaching: important for the writer and just as…

When the author came to prison, he signed up for poetry classes. He had never read or pondered any poetry before, nor did he think he would like it. He had mistakenly thought that poetry was beyond him, and only for women, squares, nerds, weirdoes, professors, and high-brows: people caught up in some unreal academic world. In this article, the…

A leading TA and writer speaks to the human importance of art making in schools, prisons, and beyond. This article attempts to demonstrate that, as human beings and as artists, we should speak up for nourishing the art-making instinct at its core, and not only for placing this gift in the service of other laudable goals.

This article takes a look at WritersCorps, a program that aims to provide opportunities for youth to discover, develop, and share their writing. The program's success depends on contracting with teaching artists who have the skills, knowledge, and heart to encourage youth to write well. All its teachers are published writers, active community…