United Black Family Scholarship Foundation

Our 100 Prisoner Book Publishing Literacy Program is a pilot program that our organization has partnered with Stony Brook University and HERSTORY to develop a self-taught writing curriculum for prisoners and to publish 100 prisoner written manuscripts, and a series of anthologies composed of essays and poems. The project also aims to produce a series of film shorts and animations adapted from this work which details the prisoner experience: countless personal journeys throughout America’s prisons and the impact of today’s social justice movements in the carceral ecosystem.

Working with students volunteers from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of New Mexico and Stony Brook University, we edit, transcribe and prepare this material for publication as part of a “Living Archive” maintained at SBU’s library and our subsidiary, Zo Media Productions, LLC. Entitled Writing Beyond the Prison: Reimagining the Carceral Ecosystem with Incarcerated Authors, the project has been funded in part by the American Council of Learned Societies and will be available for universities, scholars, advocacy organizations, and other interested parties.