As the work of Malcolm X, Angela Y. Davis, and others has made clear, education in prison has enabled people to rethink systems of oppression. Courses in reading and writing help incarcerated students feel a sense of community, examine the past and present, and imagine a better future. Yet incarcerated students often lack the resources, materials, information, and opportunity to pursue their coursework, and training is not always available for those who teach incarcerated students. This volume will aid both new and experienced instructors by providing strategies for developing courses, for creating supportive learning environments, and for presenting and publishing incarcerated students' scholarly and creative work. It also suggests approaches to self-care designed to help instructors sustain their work. Essays incorporate the perspectives of both incarcerated and nonincarcerated teachers and students, centering critical prison studies scholarship and abolitionist perspectives. This volume contains discussion of Mumia Abu-Jamal's Live from Death Row, Marita Bonner's The Purple Flower, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Othello.

This collection includes a kaleidoscope of voices and perspectives from prisoners, former prisoners, scholars, and activists to examine the extraordinarily invisible and closed system of incarceration that characterizes the massive U.S. prison industry. The book explores in multiple ways, the role of writing in carceral settings, including material realities, ethics, and social justice. It is a book about the power of writing as well as its limits. It is a book that celebrates and critiques, challenges, and reveals. It is a book that, like the writing of incarcerated women, repays careful reading.

In a time of increasing mass incarceration, US prisons and jails are becoming a major source of literary production. Prisoners write for themselves, fellow prisoners, family members, and teachers. However, too few write for college credit. In the dearth of well-organized higher education in US prisons, noncredit programs established by colleges and universities have served as a leading means of informal learning in these settings. Thousands of teachers have entered prisons, many teaching writing or relying on writing practices when teaching other subjects. Yet these teachers have few pedagogical resources. This groundbreaking collection of essays provides such a resource and establishes a framework upon which to develop prison writing programs. Prison Pedagogies does not champion any one prescriptive approach to writing education but instead recognizes a wide range of possibilities. Essay subjects include working-class consciousness and prison education; community and literature writing at different security levels in prisons; organized writing classes in jails and juvenile halls; cultural resistance through writing education; prison newspapers and writing archives as pedagogical resources; dialogical approaches to teaching prison writing classes; and more. The contributors within this volume share a belief that writing represents a form of intellectual and expressive self-development in prison, one whose pursuit has transformative potential.

Incarcerated bodies, liberated minds: a narrative of literacy education behind bars. Words No Bars Can Hold provides a rare glimpse into literacy learning under the most dehumanizing conditions. Deborah Appleman chronicles her work teaching college- level classes at a high- security prison for men, most of whom are serving life sentences. Through narrative, poetry, memoir, and fiction, the students in Appleman’s classes attempt to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories. The students’ work, through which they probe and develop their identities as readers and writers, illuminates the transformative power of literacy. Appleman argues for the importance of educating the incarcerated, and explores ways to interrupt the increasingly common journey from urban schools to our nation’s prisons. From the sobering endpoint of what scholars have called the “school to prison pipeline,” she draws insight from the narratives and experiences of those who have traveled it.

"Arguing that the school-to-prison pipeline is "one of the most urgent educational issues of our time," this volume seeks to (1) examine how and why increasing numbers of students, disproportionately youth of color, are being taken from our schools into our prisons and (2) consider what school-based educators can do to disrupt this flow and dismantle the school to prison pipeline, using examples drawn from both schools and prisons. Incorporating perspectives from both 'ends' of the pipeline, the volume provides specific strategies on curriculum, pedagogy, and disciplinary practices that can help redirect our collective efforts from carceral practices to education that will be valuable for all educators in keeping students in school and out of prison"--

“A love letter to the book as a physical object, a source of intellectual ardor, and a form of emotional salvation” (Salon)—and a nod to U and I, Nicholson Baker’s classic memoir about John Updike—from an award-winning author called “wonderfully bright” by The New York Times Book Review. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker wrote U and I, the fretful and handwringing—but also groundbreaking—tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is writer out there in the world that you must read. B & Me is that story, the story of J.C. Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker…and discovering himself in the process. Our relationship to books in the digital age, the role of art in an increasingly commodified world, the power great writing has to change us, these are at the core of Hallman’s investigation of Baker—questions he’s grappled with, values he’s come to doubt. But in reading Baker’s work, Hallman discovers the key to overcoming the malaise that had been plaguing him, through the books themselves and what he finds and contemplates in his attempts to understand them and their enigmatic author. B & Me is literary self-archaeology: an irreverent, incisive story of one reader’s desperate quest to restore passion to literature, and all the things he learns along the way. “A wide-ranging and idiosyncratic career survey for Nicholson Baker’s work, a love letter to the act of reading, and a commentary on the modern novel, this is a book that readers will absolutely adore” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

As one of the most adventurous literary and cultural critics of his generation, Terence Hawkes’ contributions to the study of Shakespeare and the development of literary and cultural theory have been immense. His work has been instrumental in effecting a radical shift in the study of Shakespeare and of literary studies. This collection of essays by some of his closest colleagues, friends, peers, and mentees begins with an introduction by John Drakakis, outlining the profound impact that Hawkes’ work had on various areas of literary studies. It also includes a poem by Christopher Norris, who worked with Hawkes for many years at the University of Cardiff, as well as work on translation, social class, the historicist and presentist exploration of Shakespearean texts, and teaching Shakespeare in prisons. The volume features essays by former students who have gone on to establish reputations in areas beyond the study of literature, and who have contributed ground-breaking volumes to the pioneering New Accents series. It concludes with Malcolm Evans’ innovative account of the migration of semiotics into the area of business. This book is a vibrant and informative read for anyone interested in Hawkes’ unique blend of literary and cultural theory, criticism, Shakespeare studies, and presentism.

The New Cambridge English Course is a four-level course for learners of English.

Prisons constitute one of the most controversial and contested sites in a democratic society. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, with over 2 million people in jails, prisons, and detention centers; with over three thousand on death row, it is also one of the few developed countries that continues to deploy the death penalty. International Human Rights Organizations such as Amnesty International have also noted the scores of political prisoners in U.S. detention. This anthology examines a class of intellectuals whose analyses of U.S. society, politics, culture, and social justice are rarely referenced in conventional political speech or academic discourse. Yet this body of outlawed 'public intellectuals' offers some of the most incisive analyses of our society and shared humanity. Here former and current U.S. political prisoners and activists-writers from the civil rights/black power, women's, gay/lesbian, American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence and anti-war movements share varying progressive critiques and theories on radical democracy and revolutionary struggle. This rarely-referenced 'resistance literature' reflects the growing public interest in incarceration sites, intellectual and political dissent for social justice, and the possibilities of democratic transformations. Such anthologies also spark new discussions and debates about 'reading'; for as Barbara Harlow notes: 'Reading prison writing must. . . demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of literature.'—Barbara Harlow [1] 1. Barbara Harlow, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (New England: Wesleyan University Press, 1992). Royalties are reserved for educational initiatives on human rights and U.S. incarceration.