Introducing the Inaugural ‘Writing Freedom’ Fellows

The fellowship’s first cohort includes twenty writers whose work explores a wide range of themes and topics, including motherhood, disability, the natural world, immigration/the border, HIV/AIDS, the rural South, and more. The Writing Freedom Fellowship aims to support and uplift the voices of system-impacted writers and counteract the atmosphere of punishment and extreme suppression brought about by the carceral state. Through the fellowship, writers will receive professional development and mentorship support, opportunities for shared learning, and a monetary award.

“This exceptional group of Fellows further reveals the profound literary achievement and vital perspectives of those who have been touched by our country’s carceral system,” said Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander. “We at Mellon are honored to join Haymarket in driving connection among these voices, galvanizing them in their advocacy, craft, and future work.”

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with nearly two million people imprisoned at any given time. Beyond prison and jail, the carceral state extends to include the criminalization of immigration, policing and probation, family policing, and involuntary commitment. These systems profoundly impact not only those who experience imprisonment but also their families and communities. The harms of the carceral state disproportionately impact communities of color and those living in poverty, and foster environments of isolation, dehumanization, and social stigma. Against this stark backdrop, Writing Freedom seeks to build community among writers, foster their creative practices, and bring their essential voices and perspectives to broader audiences. Through their work, these twenty writers help us imagine a world beyond the criminal legal system’s punishing grasp.

“I am so proud that Art for Justice funding will elevate this inaugural cohort of Writing Freedom artists and storytellers. Haymarket and Writing Freedom will create and nurture a community of learning and support around these talented writers, while expanding the landscape of ideas, perspectives, and stories, bringing us all closer to justice,” said Agnes Gund, founder, Art for Justice Fund.

Haymarket identified the inaugural cohort of twenty Writing Freedom fellows with guidance from an advisory board comprised of esteemed writers committed to supporting system-impacted writers, including: Lawrence Bartley (Publisher, The Marshall Project Inside), Mahogany L. Browne (Executive Director, JustMedia), Natalie Diaz (Poet, Pulitzer Prize Awardee), Tayari Jones (Author), Rachel Kushner (Author), Romarilyn Ralston (Executive Director, Project Rebound), Andrea J. Ritchie (Co-founder, Interrupting Criminalization Initiative), and Christopher Soto (Poet), as well as a panel of anonymous readers and dozens of expert nominators.

The groundbreaking inaugural group of fellows includes writers at various stages of their literary careers. All of the fellows are directly impacted by the criminal legal system—either through their own previous or current incarceration, that of close family members or loved ones, or direct impact by carceral systems outside of incarceration. Writing Freedom Fellows need not have written on themes related to the criminal legal system.

C. Fausto Cabrera (he/him) is a multi-genre writer and artist incarcerated from 2003–24. His work has appeared in the Colorado Review, the Antioch Review, the American Literary Review, and the Woodward Review. The Parameters of Our Cage is an epistle collaboration with photographer Alec Soth.

Zeke Caligiuri (he/they) is a multi-genre writer and editor from South Minneapolis. His work has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration, he is now helping to build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition, reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.

Starr Davis (she/her) is a poet, essayist, and dedicated mother from Columbus, Ohio. Her work has been featured in various literary platforms, and she has been recognized as a fellow at The Luminary, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and PEN America.

Stefani Echeverría-Fenn (she/they) is a queer nonfiction writer whose work explores motherhood, madness, disability, and housing justice. Her work has been published in Sinister Wisdom, The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets, Sententiae Antiquae, and Eidolon, and performed as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. Stefani was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow.

Dee Farmer (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, and a trailblazer in transgender and prison litigation, having built a robust legal writing practice. She is the architect of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Farmer v. Brennan. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, she disseminated her poems and essays within the Bureau of Prisons. 

Victoria Newton Ford (she/they) is a poet and essayist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her writing has been supported by TORCH Literary Arts, MacDowell, Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and the Hurston/Wright Writers Workshop. She is currently working on her first manuscript about Black mothers and their daughters, captivity, and haunting.

Keeonna Harris (she/her) is a memoirist, creative nonfiction writer, and abolitionist scholar, whose work centers the experiences of Black women. Her memoir Mainline Mama will debut in 2025 from Amistad Press. She is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Washington.

Kwaneta Harris (she/her) is an incarcerated writer who has spent eight years in solitary confinement in Texas. She focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and place and is working on a book about youth transferred to adult solitary confinement.

Kenneth Hartman (he/him) is an award-winning writer and prison reform activist. He is deeply involved in transforming the prison system and assisting the recently paroled.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo (he/him)is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir, Cenzontle, and Dulce. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S.. He teaches at St. Mary’s College and the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.

Quntos KunQuest (he/him) is an incarcerated fiction writer, artist, and songwriter from Shreveport, Louisiana. He is the author of This Life: A Novel (Agate, 2021), which was awarded a 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Debut Fiction category.

Ken Lamberton (he/him) writes about the nature of the Southwest. He is the author of Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations from Prison, which won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published hundreds of essays and six books, the latest of which is Chasing Arizona.

John J. Lennon (he/him) is a prison journalist and contributing editor at Esquire. His writing frequently appears in the New York Times and the Atlantic, and his forthcoming book, The Tragedy of True Crime, will be published by Celadon in 2025. He’s currently incarcerated at Sullivan Correctional Facility in New York. .

Arthur Longworth (he/him) is a six-time PEN Prison Writing Award winner, Writing For Justice Fellow, and author of Zek: An American Prison Story (Gabalfa Press, 2016). He lives in Washington state.

Ian Manuel (he/him) is the author of the memoir My Time Will Come (Pantheon, 2022). Through his writing, Manuel explores growing up in prison and solitary confinement, where he spent eighteen years of his life from ages fifteen to thirty-three. Manuel lives in Brooklyn and travels the country as a public speaker.

Ahmed Naji (he/him) is a bilingual writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and official criminal from Egypt. His works delve into music, contemporary art, prisons, and politics. Naji is the author of Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison (McSweeney’s, 2023).

Katie Schmid (she/her) is a writer from Illinois. She is the author of the poetry collection Nowhere (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), which Poetry magazine has praised for “transform[ing] the seasonal perils of girlhood, demonstrating compassion for that which both disgusts and enthralls.”

Michele Scott (she/her) is an essayist, author, and prison reform advocate. She served thirty years on a sentence of life without the possibility of parole in the world’s largest women’s prison in California—until granted a Governor’s commutation. Her writing has been published in Elle and the Marshall Project among others.

Crystal Wilkinson (she/her) is from Indian Creek, Kentucky. Her books include Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, The Birds of Opulence, and Perfect Black. She has won an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction and edits Screen Door Press, publishing diverse fiction throughout the Black diaspora.

Stevie Wilson (he/him) is a currently imprisoned Black queer abolitionist organizer and facilitator from Philadelphia. Wilson is the founder of the inside abolitionist study collective 9971 and is the founder of the abolitionist journal In the Belly. He is a columnist for the Abolitionist, a newspaper published by Critical Resistance. 

“Being selected as a Writing Freedom fellow is a huge honor to me. My writing skills were honed as a child in solitary confinement, where I read and wrote voraciously to sustain my sanity,” said Ian Manuel, 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow and author of the memoir My Time Will Come. “I look forward to my writing inspiring people in the fight to change the criminal justice system, so that no child will ever again have to use their imagination to escape the harsh reality of life in prison.”

“Our understanding of American life is incomplete without voices that represent the experience and perspective of the millions of system-impacted people who live and work alongside us every day,” said Tayari Jones, advisory board member and author of the novel An American Marriage. “This award is for writers, chosen by other writers. In this, we are affirming and deepening our understanding and definition of community, coalition, and even family. There is much made of “speaking truth to power”— but this project underscores a more revolutionary reality. Truth IS power, just as writing is freedom.”

Building on its existing history of support for higher education in prison programs and reflecting its social justice orientation, the Mellon Foundation in February 2023 launched Imagining Freedom—a $125 million initiative that supports arts, culture, and humanities work that centers the voices and expertise of people directly affected by the U.S. criminal legal system, to deepen a shared understanding of the system and its widespread impacts and move toward a more just future.

After six years of supporting artists and advocates to end mass incarceration and envision a future of shared safety for all, Art for Justice, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in partnership with the Ford Foundation, closed as planned in June 2023.

Haymarket Books continues to deepen its commitment to supporting incarcerated readers and writers and to abolitionist politics—whether through relationships cemented with abolitionist thinkers turned Haymarket authors; building space for political education and programming centering decarceration; donations of books to incarcerated readers through Haymarket’s Books Not Bars program; cultivating authors who are currently incarcerated; and most recently with the Writing Freedom Fellowship.

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Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago with a mission to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. Haymarket strives to make their books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, and internationalist Left. Connect with Haymarket Books on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty and empowerment that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and guided by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.

The Art for Justice Fund aligned artists, advocates, and allied donors to shift the narrative around criminal justice reform through art. Inaugurated in 2017 under the unprecedented philanthropic vision of Agnes Gund, A4J launched with $100M generated from the sale of Gund’s favorite painting, Roy Lichenstein’s Masterpiece (1962). This spurred artists, collectors, and supporters to donate an additional $27M + in support of the Fund’s mission to advance policy reform, shift public narratives on criminal justice, and promote the leadership of formerly incarcerated people while centering art as a catalyst to propel change. With the institutional support of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, A4J leveraged its agility and momentum as a time-limited fund to support 200+ allied artists and arts and advocacy organizations (450+ grants in total). Before A4J sunset as planned after six years, in June 2023, it allocated over $127M to the field and inspired other funders to join the movement. For more on A4J and its lessons learned, please see its new archival website at www.artforjusticefund.org.