We are Empowerment Avenue
We normalize the practice of including incarcerated artists and writers in mainstream venues.
That means bridging the gap and building capacity for publications, galleries, museums, and other organizations committed to this work. It also means prioritizing support networks for incarcerated creatives to share their work outside prison walls, be fairly compensated for it, and contribute creatively to the abolition movement and liberation of incarcerated people.
Empowerment Ave News is a space for us to share updates with our community of incarcerated writers, the volunteer collective on the outside, and readers interested in the movement. Subscribe for monthly updates on our latest stories, art, and events.
History
Empowerment Avenue’s Writing for Liberation track was launched in summer 2020 by formerly incarcerated journalist Rahsaan “New York” Thomas and freelance journalist Emily Nonko. Since then, the collective has supported publication of more than 200 pieces by incarcerated writers around the country, who have earned over $110,000.
After Rahsaan launched the Writing for Liberation track in 2020, he began thinking about how he could support visual artists at San Quentin Prison. EA began partnering with museums, galleries, artists, and organizers to exhibit and sell the pieces while building capacity and support networks for incarcerated curators. So far we’ve supported the sale of eight artworks that earned artists over $9,000. Rahsaan has led curation of all our exhibits.
Partnerships
We have partnered with editors, news organizations, lit journals, and many others to help facilitate support systems that uplift and compensate incarcerated writers. Some of those partnerships include the following:
In 2021, we partnered with Scalawag Magazine to produce The Press in Prison, a practical and abolitionist guidebook to help journalists and editors build capacity to hire and collaborate with incarcerated writers.
We partnered with Apogee Journal to produce the Inside/Out journal, which compensated 35 incarcerated artists, poets and writers.
Emily worked with the Solutions Journalism Network as a 2021 LEDE fellow to seed solutions storytelling inside prisons.
In 2020, Rahsaan partnered with Flyaway Productions and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) to create a multi-faceted project that asked how Black and Jewish voices can amplify the call for racial justice via an end to mass incarceration—Meet Us Quickly With Your Mercy. As part of that project MoAD hosted an online exhibition titled Meet Us Quickly: Painting for Justice from Prison, featuring the work of twelve currently and formerly incarcerated artists. We hosted an auction for the artwork and MoAD compensated every artist for their participation in the exhibition. That was followed up with an outdoor dance performance by Flyaway Productions at CounterPulse and was coupled with an in-person Painting for Justice exhibition and artwork sale by the incarcerated artists.
Writing
We have supported publication of poetry, essays, reporting, op-eds, and more. A few of our favorite pieces include As COVID Raged, Incarcerated Journalists Fought Isolation and Illness to Expose Abusive Conditions for Shadowproof, How Prison Writers Struggle to Be Heard for the Appeal, I’m Trapped In a Women’s Prison For the Pandemic for Elle Magazine, and As Prison Staff Try to Erase Queer and Trans Folks, We Assert our Right to Exist for Truthout.
Press
Our work was profiled by Columbia Journalism Review in April 2021. Emily was interviewed for the newsletter Welcome to Hellword, and she and EA writer Ryan Moser were interviewed by the Squirrel News podcast about reporting solutions journalism inside prison.
Meet Us Quickly: Painting for Justice received extensive press and ended up being MoAD’s most-covered exhibition to date. Rahsaan has talked about his curatorial role with Artnet, ABC News, Datebook and others.
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