Hear Us: Writing from the Inside During the Time of COVID on Writers on Writing, KUCI-FM
Hear Us:Writing from the Inside During the Time of COVID is a collection of over 50 essays, poems, pieces of fiction, and artwork from—or about—inmates serving time in U.S. correctional facilities. The incarcerated are infected by COVID at a rate five times higher than the general population. Crowded conditions, lack of sanitation, and inadequate medical care all contribute to the desperate conditions inside our prison system. Alongside COVID, our national conversation regarding race, racism, and a long overdue reckoning was also taking place behind bars.
Exchange-for-Change, a nonprofit organization, offers writing courses in prisons and runs letter exchanges between incarcerated students and writers studying on the outside. They partnered with Disorder Press, a sibling owned and operated independent press, to publish this anthology. Alongside living with—and dying of—COVID in our correctional institutions, inmates write about the Black Lives Matter movement, general prison life, and what the past year was like behind bars.
Kathie Klarreich (Executive Director for Exchange-for-Change), Mik Grantham (owner of Disorder Press) and Tina Barrett (sister of a former incarcerated student of Exchange-for-Change who died of COVID last year, and a contributor to the anthology) join Marrie Stone to talk about the anthology and the organization that supported its creation.
(Broadcast date: August 4, 2021)