Dear Ones,

We’re happy to help announce and promote BREAK OUT: a movement to (re)integrate incarcerated writers into literary community, an effort from The Poetry Project and the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program.

Throughout the month of September, over two dozen local reading series in New York City—and across the country—will feature the work of a currently incarcerated writer. The BREAK OUT series culminates with the 2019 PEN America Prison Writing Awards and Anthology Launch, the evening of September 18, 2019, at the Brooklyn Book Festival. This dynamic free-to-the-public program, held at St. Marks Church in Manhattan, features awarded works by incarcerated writers staged by Margo Jefferson, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, T Kira Madden, Shaun Leonardo, and others TBA.

Madeleine was a participant in the prison writing program from their early days. When I was in college and graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I sometimes helped my grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle, with her mail. She received more than 400 letters a week at her New York apartment, Crosswicks (her home in Northwest Connecticut), and at her office at the Library of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. It was at the Library where I first came across a letter from Ahmad Rahman. The envelope’s return address was Jackson State Penitentiary with a long identification number on it, and I asked my grandmother about it.

She told me that it was from her friend. She didn’t say much more about it to me that morning, as we were sorting and prioritizing work. While she read every piece of mail that crossed her desk, some letters she answered herself and some she dictated. She answered Ahmad Rahman herself, and had done so since they first began corresponding in 1976 as part of the PEN America prison writing program. Their first exchanges of letters were cautious, testing each other and building trust across race and class and gender and circumstance. It grew to be a deep friendship whose foundation was a love of writing and words, and a commitment to truth-telling and listening, even when that is difficult.

Ahmad Rahman was released from prison in 1992 after a gubernatorial pardon. He was the first prisoner in Michigan to earn a BA while incarcerated, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. and was a beloved professor at the University of Michigan. As I organized my grandmother’s papers following her death in 2007, I kept coming across letters and would occasionally try to find him (the state called him one name; he called himself another, and so it wasn’t a straightforward search). I was able eventually to reach out to him, and he and I corresponded and even met in person (something he and Madeleine were never able to do). He died suddenly of a heart attack in 2015 at the age of 64.

As part of the culminating event on September 18th, PEN will be announcing the creation of a mentorship award named in their honor. We’re excited to be part of that and will have more news as the date gets closer.

— Charlotte Jones Voiklis