United Black Family Scholarship Foundation

Our Hundred Stories Project 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 the Humanities Institute at SBU (click here to access archive) 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, Lenski Covey Foundation, and the Center for Changing Systems of Power at SBU, and is now available to access for universities, scholars, advocacy organizations, and other interested parties.

It is our hopes that this project will assist to develop more effective approaches to the crisis that mass incarceration creates in underrepresented communities. For these reasons, not only are we giving voice to thousands of unsung voices hidden in the cold, concrete cellblocks of American prisons, but we hope to change lives in system-impacted communities.

Below are a few of the writings authored by the UBFSF founder, Ivan Kilgore.

To learn more or get involved, contact us below.