Spring 2021 Carceral Studies Consortium micro-grant recipients, Catherine Mintler, Nick LoLordo, and Timothy Bradford, have begun the process of re-establishing their connection to the Writers Guild and have revived their monthly in-person writing workshops. Read on for an update and statement from Bradford, Mintler, and LoLordo on the recent progress of their project (Mar. 2022).
Micro-Grant Report
One year ago, Catherine Mintler, Nick LoLordo, and Timothy Bradford, all Lecturers in the Expository Writing Program, received a microgrant from the University of Oklahoma Carceral Studies Consortium to continue and expand work with the Writers Guild, a group of incarcerated writers at Joseph Harp Correctional Center. The proposed project was titled Writers Guild: Giant Steps, and with the support from the CSC, Mintler, LoLordo, and Bradford created a 501(c)(3) named Oklahoma Prison Writers and Artists Foundation, or OPWAF, provided the Writers Guild with necessary writing supplies and books as well as an annual winter holiday social gathering, and started developing a website, which should be live in late spring or early summer. While additional project plans to begin snail mail-based workshops never materialized due to pandemic-related time and organizational constraints, we and other volunteers did stay in touch via personal correspondence. Additionally, we along with former Writers Guild member Mr. Dimitri Washington took part in Recovering History: Poetry on the Carceral State and Internment at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa in April of 2021.
As of July 2021, monthly in-person writing workshops at JHCC have recommenced and more in-person readings to celebrate the anthology Emergence: Writings by the JHCC Writers Guild are being planned. While several founding Writers Guild members have been transferred and others are nearing the ends of their sentences and preparing for release, two new members have joined, and as a recent February 2022 workshop introducing erasure poetry showed, this group remains committed, enthusiastic, and creative. In this workshop, LoLordo helped members discover their own poems inside those of John Milton, William Shakespeare, and M. NourbSe Philip, once again demonstrating that the need to work with language to recreate and reimage one’s world behind bars, to find freedom and agency in the moment, remains vital and unchanging.
Prison Writing, Group Founding, and Pre-Pandemic Work
The genre of prison writing, which roughly means any writing done while incarcerated, includes work that ranges from Boethieus to Reginald Dwayne Betts. Currently, the biggest organization doing prison and justice writing work in the US is PEN America’s PEN Prison Writing Program, which “believes in the restorative, rehabilitative, and transformative possibilities of writing.” Founded in 2014, the Tulsa-based Poetic Justice has provided workshops to over 400 incarcerated women in Oklahoma, California, and Juarez, Mexico. Currently, the Writers Guild is the only prison writing program for men in Oklahoma. The Writers Guild and OPWAF see these organizations as both models and allies in their efforts to expand prison and justice writing in Oklahoma and beyond.
In 2017, Keith Charisma, one of the founding members of the Writers Guild, sent a letter to then-acting OU Writing Center Director Michele Eodice asking for help with a creative writing group they’d started. Eodice, Rachael Jackson, former Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program and now an Assistant Professor in the English Department, and Catherine Mintler and Nick LoLordo, both Lecturers with Expo, responded and began monthly workshop meetings with a group of eleven already accomplished and focused writers. In early 2019, Expo Lecturer Timothy Bradford joined the group, and by the end of 2019, after a lot of work on both sides of the fence, Mongrel Empire Press published the anthology Emergence: Writings by the JHCC Writers Guild, featuring the work of Michael “Rico” Cruz, Shonach Lokisson, Dilemma, Luke Anthem Sinclair, Elzie Hooks, Jr., Shannon D. Hunt, Moryé D. Chandler, Sr., Anonymous Kquote, Kirby Lowe, Keith Charisma, and Mr. Washington.
Around the same time, Wonderful Faison, AJ Tierney, Paul Juhasz, and Kylee George joined as volunteers and led workshops. Their writing was flourishing and everyone was optimistic about future prospects. The publication was followed by one reading inside the facility and one reading at the Norman Public Library Central featuring Mr. Washington, who had been released since the anthology’s publication.
This introduction that the group wrote for Emergence gives a sense of their energy, character, and camaraderie at this time: “The Emergence is but a small glimpse, a primary glance, at the depth and breadth of the men contained in its covers. We are passion. We are timidity. We are courage. We are hilarity. We are smooth operators penning fibs filled with verity. We are oxymorons and quintessential examples: we are more than a handful. Gird up your loins and prepare for mental insurgence . . . now presenting the Emergence!”
We had plans for additional readings, but then the pandemic hit, Joseph Harp shut down volunteer visits, when we could return became uncertain, and communicating through snail mail made everything far more difficult.
In-person Return
On July 4th, 2021, we returned to the Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, Oklahoma, to meet with the Writers Guild and have our first workshop together since the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The rural Oklahoma green and red sprawled around the concrete facility that looks surprisingly like a community college campus save for the columned fences topped by rows and rows of razor wire gleaming and flashing in the sun. We arrived in the parking lot at 8:45 AM and made our way through the unpredictable security line—will it be well-staffed and short or understaffed and long? After two gates, numerous security cameras, the security line with its x-ray and pat down, and a final heavy steel door, we saw them, the men of the Writers Guild, who’d been locked down, meaning confined to their cells for much of the day for too much of the last year. All considered, they looked great—unflappable and eager to move on—and they greeted us warmly and enthusiastically.
“How did you get through the pandemic?” This was the question we asked on that first day back before doing a workshop on Fredrick Douglas’s speech “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?” The answers varied widely from work privileges to writing more. The most poignant answer came from Elzie Hooks, Jr., who shared how the facility paired him with a younger cellmate at the start of the pandemic and how he’d taught “this youngster” how to “do time” during lockdown. Specifically, Hooks said he taught him how you don’t stand at the bars or pace up and down them, hollering at whoever comes by. You lie on your bed and read or watch TV. You keep your calm. When it comes time to wash up, you hang a blanket in the center of the cell and take turns. You don’t let them take your dignity. You stay clean and you stay calm. Mr. Hooks added that he served part of his sentence at McAlester, the state maximum security penitentiary, which was how he knew what to do.
Stories such as this—how one keeps one’s dignity and agency during extreme circumstances—are just one reason why prison writing work is so important.
About the Project
Excerpted from the project proposal submitted to the OU Carceral Studies Consortium in Spring 2021 by Catherine Mintler, Nick LoLordo, and Timothy Bradford, prior to the start of the project.
In 2017, Michele Eodice, Catherine Mintler, and Nick LoLordo began monthly in-person workshops with an established group of eleven writers, the“Writers Guild,” incarcerated at Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, Oklahoma. These men had been regularly meeting weekly, had produced a wide range of poems, essays, fiction, and non-fiction, and sought mentors to connect their writing to public audiences and to help publish their work. Eodice, Mintler, LoLordo, and Timothy Bradford, who joined in 2019, provided weekly feedback and writing exercises, a process leading to Mongrel Empire Press publishing Emergence: Writings by the JHCC Writers Guild.
Everyone was pleased and hopeful … and then the pandemic struck. Since spring 2019 volunteer visits and internal Guild meetings alike have been prohibited.
In short, vital relationships and projects have been largely put on hold. Our main objective in “Writers Guild: Giant Steps” is to reengage the group in a regular fashion and return to our pre-pandemic goals. In particular, Giant Steps will a) establish a 503c non-profit under the name OPWAF: Oklahoma Prison Writers and Artists Foundation, b) create a website for the foundation that will feature new inmate writing for a broader public audience and generate publicity and sales for the Emergence anthology, c) establish a correspondence-based writing course until in-person visits are possible, and d) provide the Guild with needed writing supplies. These goals will be carried out by current volunteers from OU’s Expository Writing Program, Langston University, and other working writers.
Editor’s Note: The OU Carceral Studies Consortium is led by its core board members, including Angela Person (acting chair, Architecture), Connie Chapple (incoming director, Sociology), Nancy Snow (Philosophy), Stephanie Pilat (Architecture), and Marjorie Callahan (Architecture), with support from Matt Bejar (graduate fellow, Sociology).
Featured image: Nick LoLordo, Dimitri Washington, and Catherine Mintler at Recovering History: Poetry on the Carceral State and Internment at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa in April of 2021.