In this essay, the authors describe a collaborative, community-engaged graduate seminar in which students and incarcerated writers worked together to write promotional brochures for WordsUncaged, a prison writing program. Drawing on reflective writing from graduate students and incarcerated writers, the authors apply a hospitality framework to articulate participants’ learning and growth. The public nature of… Continue reading Our Amalgamated Voices Speak: Graduate Students and Incarcerated Writers Collaborate for a Common Purpose by Katheryn Perry & Bidhan Roy

Community writing partnerships between university and incarcerated students typically focus on developing critical reading and writing skills through shared assignments, peer review exchanges, and group discussion. This article examines a prison-university writing partnership between two semester-long yoga classes, one at a maximum-security women’s prison and one at a competitive university, that privileges building community over… Continue reading Contemplative Methods for University-Prison Writing Partnerships: Building Sangha through ‘The Om Exchange by Sarah Moseley

Think about your reading life. What piece of writing has “taken the top of your head off,” to use Emily Dickenson’s phrase? Write a reading narrative in which you enter into dialogue with this writing—feel free to quote it. How has this reading experience changed you and helped you to redefine your life and your… Continue reading Citizen Cuffed: An American Carceral Experience by Melissa McKee

A proliferation of scholarship, teaching, and activism in the field of rhetoric and composition attends to prison writing, as an ethical imperative to combat mass incarceration and its dire consequences (Jacobi, Hinshaw, Berry, Rogers, etc.). However, parole board writing— arguably the genre of writing within prison most closely tied to material liberation—remains largely unexamined, both… Continue reading The Truth Will Set You Free: Reflections on the Rhetoric of Insight, Responsibility, and Remorse in Rhetoric for the Board of Parole Hearings by Mo, Stephanie Bower, Raymond P., Emily Artiano, William M., & Ben Pack

Twice, and sometimes even three times a week, Kathie Klarreich enters the front entry gate of Dade Correctional Institution to teach creative writing. Armed with a see-through plastic carrying case filled with pencils, paper, and the day’s assignments and handouts, she’s ready to bash the monotonous lives of the prisoners with stimulating reads and intriguing… Continue reading The Effects of Educational Programs in Prison Towards Overall Rehabilitation: The Observations and Perspective of a Prisoner by Christopher Malec

Kathie Karreich reflects on her experience as a writing facilitator in South Florida prisons. Two South Florida prisons sit on the edge of the Everglades. Klarreich, founder of the prison writing organization Exchange for Change, examines her own relationship to, and that of, the endangered lives on both sides of the razor wire, and the… Continue reading The Everglades’ Forgotten Fauna: Jailbirds by Kathie Klarreich

This analysis uses a critical race framework from African American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping… Continue reading Bodily Instruments: Somatic Metaphor in Prison-based Research by Libby Catchings

Common in higher education in prison (HEP) and writing studies research is the idea that writing and education are transformative for incarcerated populations. While we believe that both can be powerful tools for reflection and social change among people on the inside, the prevalence of such transformation narratives can contribute to stereotypical depictions or understandings… Continue reading More than Transformative: A New View of Prison Writing Narratives by Larry Barrett, Pablo Mendoza, Logan Middleton, Mario Rubio, & Thomas Stromblad

In recent decades, phrases such as “mass incarceration” and “prison industrial complex” have become part of our national vocabulary, indicating a growing awareness about the cost (in lives and dollars) of maintaining the world’s largest prison population. Indeed, 2019 has seen increased attention to issues of incarceration and justice from both conservative and liberal media… Continue reading Guest Editors’ Introduction by Wendy Hinshaw & Tobi Jacobi

From Guest Editors Wendy Hinshaw & Tobi Jacobi This workshop is our connection to the outside world. A chance for us to be heard, something that teaches us how to connect through our writing. —SpeakOut writer Miami inmates are what becomes of the chicken before I fry it up. —Thant T. Lallamont, Exchange for Change… Continue reading Introducing Reflections 19.1, Special Issue on Prison Writing, Literacies and Communities

Mass incarceration in the United States is deeply entrenched into the political and economic makeup of modern America. In a time of political upheaval and radical change, prison and criminal justice reform activists are turning the public’s attention towards the problem of America’s prisons and shining a light on the forgotten voices of the incarcerated.… Continue reading Review: The Named and the Nameless: 2018 PEN Prison Writing Awards Anthology by Jenny Albright, Kalyn Bonn, Matt Getty, Zach Marburger, Brooks Mitchell, Jake Quinter, & Shivon Pontious

As the founder of Indiana Prison Writers Workshop, I go into Indiana correctional facilities each week to facilitate a creative writing workshop. The workshop, I would argue, allows my students to experience a therapeutic avenue for expression. Writing can encourage us to explore our emotional states and can cultivate more critical self-awareness and critical thinking.… Continue reading Review: Feeding the Roots of Self-Expression and Freedom by Jimmy Santiago Baca by Debra Des Vignes

Demands for more innovative approaches to prison education have flooded the calls for papers in rhetoric and composition journals (Hinshaw & Jacobi 2018; Smith McKoy and Alexander 2018), marking a necessary push toward more dialogic prison engagement and collaboration. Specific to this special issue, Hinshaw and Jacobi (2018) hope to curate pedagogical awareness to include… Continue reading Review: Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers edited by Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Robertson by Charisse S. Iglesias

When legislation passed in 1994 denying Pell Grants for incarcerated students, prison college programs—once considered a valuable instrument for transformation— became nearly extinct. Access to higher education is increasingly aligned with privilege, and the messy intersection of incarceration and higher education aptly reflects the use of oppression, inequality, and surveillance as a means to profit—also… Continue reading Review: Doing Time, Writing Lives, Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education by Patrick Berry by Sally F. Benson

With the advent of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, our collective awareness about mass incarceration in the United States, and around the world, has taken on new significance. Fueled by these foundational contributions to our civic discourse, we are in the midst of a public reckoning about the dangerous… Continue reading Review: Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons around the World by Baz Dreisinger by Lauren Alessi & Fairleigh Gilmour

Applying the framework of coalitional rhetoric, this paper seeks to consider the rhetoric of prison literacy work and its implications for university-community relationships. Through an examination of four academic publications— three peer-reviewed articles and one published conference paper—that advocate or reflect the possibility of coalitionbuilding between prison education programs and prison abolition. Link to PDF

In her essay “All I Have, a Lament and a Boast: Why Prisoners Write,” Bell Gale Chevigny (2005) laments, “neither they [the prisoners] nor society were as susceptible to change as I’d dreamed” (246). Yet, like the PEN Prison Writing Program, other programs have also begun to reach out a hand, with notebook and pencil,… Continue reading Review: Don’t Shake the Spoon edited by Bed Bogart at Exchange for Change by Jennifer Anderson, Manton Chambers, Roland Dumavor, Caitlin Johnson, Matthew Norwood-Klingstedt, & Jennifer Rojas

Increasingly, academics across the disciplines rely on Twitter to share their research. Scholars in fields ranging from climate science (Katharine Hayhoe) to history (Kevin Kruse) use the platform to make their work available beyond “classrooms, journals, and the occasional book” (Pettit 2018). Yet the uptick in academic tweeting has received pushback from other scholars. Gordon… Continue reading Review of Social Writing/Social Media:Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies by Megan Von Bergen

Candice Rai and Caroline Druschke have compiled an edited collection of ten articles about field rhetoric written by scholars from disciplines as diverse as English and communication, ecology, and political science. They view rhetoric as ecological, “a complex constellation of persuasive forces in the world” that is best studied in context— through fieldwork, actively engaging… Continue reading Review of Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion by Mary Le Rouge

Steven Alvarez’s Community Literacies en Confianza provides a perfect example of how conversations about language, literacy, and community can benefit from cross-disciplinary engagement. In this accessible, grounded illustration of how youth navigate literacy learning at two after-school programs, Alvarez ties together interdisciplinary conversations related to language and literacy while also providing clear recommendations for teachers… Continue reading Review of Community Literacies en Confianza by Laura Gonzales

To those outside of academia, college professors lead charmed lives. What’s not to love with the Hollywood version of twelve-hour work weeks, six figure salaries, meaningful discussions of the mind, summers off, and even paid sabbaticals for pet projects? For those who toil in the trenches, teaching mandatory freshman composition and literature classes, the grim… Continue reading Review of The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission by Natalie Dorfeld

What do rhetorics, both those of the past and those circulating in the present, have to teach us about overcoming impediments to democratic participation? Questions like these are explored prominently by Jonathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, and Nancy Welch (2018), who extend the disruptive capacities of unruliness as rhetorical tactic in their edited collection Unruly… Continue reading Review of Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics by Jacob Richter

This essay presents a polyvocal review of the 2019 Conference on Community Writing. It is composed of a series of vignettes and reflections written by the authors, community partners, conference organizers, educators, and others who attended the conference. Together, these reflections examine a central theme of the conference, “the work” of community writing, by attending… Continue reading The Work of the Conference on Community Writing: Reflections on the 2019 Philadelphia Conference by Adam Hubrig, Heather Lindenman, Justin Lohr, & Rachael Wendler Shah

As activists from historically marginalized communities advocate for themselves when confronted with increasing environmental and social injustices, students and scholars are uniquely poised to collect examples of, learn from, and amplify activists’ rhetorical efforts at intervention. This article argues for activist archival work in which researchers collect examples of activist interventions as a critical form… Continue reading Activist Archival Research, Environmental Intervention, and the Flint Water Crisis by Julie Collins Bates

April 15, 2013 started out as a beautiful spring day in Boston. It was Patriots Day, a local holiday and a day reserved for the world’s oldest marathon. I was at my mom’s house, an hour away from the finish line, when a friend messaged me about explosions. The message came with a link to… Continue reading #BostonStrong/BostonStrong?: A Personal Essay on Digital Community Engagement by Kristi Girdharry

Co-authored by a nonprofit administrator and an English Department faculty member, this contribution discusses the creation of a community partnership for jail-based education and writing projects. By starting small through student internships directly with the nonprofit, manageable, programmatic development followed that included classbased community writing projects, capstones, and onsite workshops engaging graduate and undergraduate students.… Continue reading Building an Infrastructure for a Jail Writing Community Partnership through Student Internships and Community Writing Projects by Lara Smith-Sitton & Brody Smithwick

In responding to conversations on engaged infrastructure, racial and reparative justice, and transformational WPA leadership, I call for more writing teachers and writing programs to take up grantwriting as a way to create much needed infrastructure for small, struggling grassroots nonprofits (NPOs). I detail G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in Valued Environments), a community writing project at Towson… Continue reading Grantwriting Infrastructure for Grassroots Nonprofits: A Case Study and Resource for Attempting to ‘Return Stolen Things by Zosha Stuckey

This profile examines “Writing for Advocacy,” a pair of Spring 2018 courses designed around community engagement and project-based learning. Supported by a grant from Conexión Américas and the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC), Christian Brothers University (CBU), a regional leader for educating undocumented students, provided a fertile space for a course that leveraged student voices… Continue reading Writing for Advocacy: DREAMers, Agency, and Meaningful Community Engaged Writing (Course Profile) by Jeffrey Gross & Alison A. Lukowski

This article analyzes the capacity for public art to build a “métis” infrastructure (Grabill 2007) capable of supporting local experiential and performative knowledge about the environment. The article describes the work of UPPArts, a small, nonprofit arts organization focused on promoting environmental awareness. Their long-term cultivation of partnerships with state agencies, NGOs, and community residents… Continue reading Public Art as Social Infrastructure: Methods and Materials for Social Action at Environmentally Contaminated Sites by Jason Peters

Communities are in constant flux, shifting within a network of people, things and spaces; yet it is not uncommon to see a universal narrative emerge within the local commonplace of our towns and cities. These narratives are often too simplistic, avoiding the dynamic array of rhetorical flows that are circling through the social, material and… Continue reading Walking in Jamaica: Exploring the Boundaries and Bridges of Rhetorical Agency by Brent Lucia

During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class… Continue reading The Muted Group Video Project: Amplifying the Voices of Latinx Immigrant Students by Christine Martorana

Higher education research has demonstrated the positive effects of service-learning on students, with particular attention to the increased attainment of institutional outcomes such as retention and graduation. However, traditional assessment models, focused on measuring outcomes, offer few strategies for developing a holistic understanding of service learning environments. In response, this article outlines the process of… Continue reading Heuristic Tracing and Habits for Learning: Developing Generative Strategies for Understanding Service Learning by Laurie A. Pinkert & Kendall Leon

Over the last roughly twenty years, or between 2000 and 2019, scholarship on community writing has built upon a focus on service-learning composition courses to include the roles of writing and rhetoric in community engagement more generally, including necessary inquiry into the ethics of community engagement altogether. In this time, the longer-term effects of service-learning… Continue reading The Long-Term Effects of Service-Learning on Composition Students by Chris Iverson

We write this introduction for our fourth, coedited issue of Reflections at a historic moment between the passage of two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the House and his possible (theoretical) removal in the Senate. This conjuncture comes just two months after the third Conference on Community Writing took place in Philadelphia… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Laurie Grobman & Deborah Mutnick

 “I’m just gonna let you know how it is’: Situating Writing and Literacy Education in Prison” | Tobi Jacobi “Where Lifelines Converge: Voices from the Forest Correctional Creative Writing Group” | Laura Rogers “Disturbing Where We Are Comfortable: Notes from Behind the Walls” | Lori Pompa “Prison 101” | Shane R. Hillman “Telephone Conversation with… Continue reading Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2004

“Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses” | Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy“In the Eye of the Beholder: Contrasting Views of Community Service Writing” | Teresa M. Redd “Service-Learning Outcomes in English Composition Courses: An Application of the Campus Compact Assessment Protocol” | J. Richard Kendrick, Jr. & John Suarez “Keep it… Continue reading Volume 3, Number 1, Winter 2003

Ira Shor serves on the English faculty at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and is Professor in the City University of New York’s Graduate School, where he started up the doctorate in composition/ rhetoric in 1993. His nine books include a recent three-volume set in honor of the late Paulo Freire which includes Critical… Continue reading Hybrid Idioms in Writing the Community: An Interview with Ira Shor by Hannah Ashley

This article examines the implications of service-learning educators’ commitments to community literacy for professional development in higher education. It places stories of professional development in composition studies within the context of community literacy needs and of broader debates about tenure and promotion practices. The article proposes a set of questions that challenge compositionists to draw… Continue reading Faculty Development, Service-Learning and Composition: A Communal Approach to Professional Development by Nancy C. DeJoy

The critical lenses provided by the author’s framing of the domains of charity, civic engagement and social action highlight the assumptions and implications of different service-learning models. Classroom practices and writing assignments are interrogated for their affinity with each of the domains and their inherent power to shape students’ reading of the world. Link to… Continue reading Reading and Writing the World: Charity, Civic Engagement and Social Action in Service-Learning by Betty Smith Franklin

One of the more popular approaches to community-based writing asks students to compose workplace documents like reports, manuals or brochures for community organizations. After doing this for the first time, students and teachers alike often register their surprise about how dramatically writing in academic courses differs from writing in nonacademic organizations. They also come to… Continue reading Review of Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Paré Mahwah by Tom Deans

This article investigates the successes and failures of an upper-level service-learning composition course on the theme of “literacies” in order to uncover the particular challenges of engaging in community-based critical teaching in a faith-based institution. It identifies a religiously grounded form of noblesse oblige revealed in students’ literacy autobiographies and proposes pedagogical interventions to engage… Continue reading The Best of Intentions: Service-Learning and Noblesse Oblige at a Christian College by B. Cole Bennett

At a moment when multiculturalism is inspiring new directions for studying non-fiction, new literary genres are emerging, including the oral history narrative. This essay explores the value of the oral history narrative through its recovery in a service-learning course. Interrogating questions of genre, subjectivity, ethics, and composition, this paper affirms the place of oral history… Continue reading A Hunger for Memory: Oral History Recovery in Community Service-Learning by Susie Lan Cassel

This essay explores the many benefits of adding a community-based writing component to the first year composition course. It looks closely at the self-selected projects of 25 freshmen at a large suburban university to show how service-learning creates a context in which students can gain greater control over their own literacy and learn more about self… Continue reading Surprised By Service: Creating Connections Through Community-Based Writing by Linda Cullum

A Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, Linda Flower pioneered the study of cognitive processes in writing. Motivated by the need for a more integrated socialcognitive approach to writing, her recent research has focused on how writers construct negotiated meaning in the midst of conflicting internal and social voices. Flower is Director of Carnegie… Continue reading The Evolution of ‘Intercultural Inquiry’ by Linda Flower

Service learning as a pedagogy and its partner, community based research, have both made productive interventions into prison and jail life, greeted many times with relief by administrative staffs no longer funded for what some politicians call the “extras” of education. From the inside, administrators and inmates join those on the outside—ex-inmates, educators, concerned family… Continue reading Afterword: Rewriting the Story of Prison Literacies by Patricia E. O’Connor

Patricia McConnel’s Sing Soft, Sing Loud had me captivated from the beginning to the end. The book is divided into two sections based on the two main characters, “Iva” and “Toni.” These two women’s stories drew me in. I found myself laughing aloud, tearing up in sadness and anger, and silently cheering them on. Although… Continue reading Review of Sing Soft, Sing Loud by Linda Caldwell

The explosive growth in the U.S. prison and jail population over the past two decades, recently exceeding two million, has earned our country the highest imprisonment rate in the world. This increase is due in part to changes made in U.S. sentencing policy in the eighties and nineties during the height of the “War on… Continue reading Review of Inner Lives: Voices of African American Voices in Prison by Candice S. Rai

Women’s bodies do two things that make women easier to punish than men: menstruate and give birth. That biology controls the destiny of women in prison is obvious in the statistics alone, from the ‘positive side’ (women’s generally less violent offenses and shorter sentences), to the most negative (the frequency with which incarcerated women, unlike… Continue reading Review of Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings 200 to the Present by Clarinda Harris

The book Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters by Wally Lamb and his writers group of women at a New York Maximum Security Correctional Facility would be an enjoyable read for anyone wishing to learn more about the prison experience. It is a book of autobiographical short stories written by the… Continue reading Review of Couldn’t Keep it to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters by Gretchen Schumacher & Deborah C. Smith

The Soul Knows No Bars, written by a philosophy professor and a group of inmates at the Maryland Penitentiary, is a book that works on a multitude of levels. If you want to understand what happens in the lives of inmates in a men’s maximum-security prison, you are offered the wisdom of its resident sages.… Continue reading Review of The Soul Knows No Bars: Inmates Reflect on Life, Death, and Hope by Phyllis Hastings