A Home for Liberation
After three years of dreaming, the Visual Arts for Liberation Program now has a dedicated gallery space in Oakland.
Welcome to Empowerment Ave! Learn more about our history, partnerships, and past published work here. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
EA Community,
This month, instead of highlighting a particular artist, we have some game-changing news to share: The Visual Arts for Liberation Program now has a physical home, complete with a dedicated gallery space.
This has been a goal three years in the making. We want to thank Christine, our Director of Visual Arts for Liberation, for generously allowing the art program to operate out of her home for all this time. That level of care and commitment helped carry us here. But it was time to give her home fully back, and time for us to set the terms and conditions for what EA produces and how we produce it.
What this means for our inside community is the ability to lead, create, and co-build alongside other currently incarcerated artists. What this means for our outside community is access to an art studio uniquely shaped by and centered on incarcerated and system-impacted cultural producers. This space will feature exhibitions developed with inside artists, offering a platform to tell their stories, create on their own terms, and define the narrative. Not as subjects of the work, but as leaders and knowledge makers.
Located in the heart of Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood, where Oakland Art Murmur and the monthly First Friday events light up the streets with art and celebration, this gallery places our artists directly within the city’s cultural rhythm.
We are working as quickly as we can to mount an inaugural exhibition that highlights some of the incredible talented EA artists’ works.
You can find us at 473 25th Street, alongside Mercury 20, Manna Gallery, Fourth Wall, and Slate Contemporary. We’re excited to be in community with the other incredible galleries on 25th Street.
Stay tuned for more information about our opening celebrations. We can’t wait to welcome you into the space!
Empowerment Ave News amplifies the work of incarcerated writers, filmmakers and artists. Subscribe to receive new posts and support the collective.
Writer Spotlight: Robert Lee Williams
The Writing for Liberation program supports more than 30 incarcerated journalists, essayists, and poets. We share their published work in each newsletter edition, but we have not often highlighted individual writers—until now.
Each month, we’ll be using this section of the newsletter to spotlight one of the writers we support, beginning with Robert Lee Williams.
Robert is a journalist and an essayist who has written for the New York Times, Literary Hub, the Prison Journalism Project, Plough Quarterly, the Freedom Reads Blog, PEN America, and Slate. His work focuses on exposing injustice and abuse in the criminal justice system, particularly the New York State prison system, while also highlighting the humanity of the incarcerated.
Here is more about what inspires Robert to write:
My birthmark, which rests at the crease of my waist, is shaped like the point of an old fountain pen. I guess for the same reason fire is called to burn, I’m drawn to the page. It’s in my nature. I’m an artist.
My early journalistic work for Slate added to a larger body of complaints and investigatory research, which led the governor of New York and her administration to close a particular prison. However, I rather my words impact people, not shuffle broken people around broken systems. I want that young girl or boy surrounded by the chaos of their immediate environment to read my work, and feel inspired to pick up a pen, instead of their fists, quiet all the noise, and let the narrator kicking around in their head, find the page.
Writing for me is pleasurable in itself. I enjoy writing unpublishable rants that will never see mainstream publication (laughs). And comeback stories, I enjoy writing those, pulling readers along a narrative arc from the gutter to the glorious.
We hope you will read Robert’s work and share it in your networks. Thank you for being part of EA, Robert!
Our Latest Work
EA artist Jennifer Rhodes’ illustration, Breakaway, was published by Zócalo Public Square1 alongside an essay by incarcerated writer David Media about how prison self-help classes help us all.
Timothy Peoples writes for Knock LA2 about how California’s updated Racial Justice Act, known as AB 1071, is restoring hope for the state’s incarcerated population.
Xandan Gulley has been receiving gender-affirming care for nearly six years, but after the Texas Department of Criminal Justice cut healthcare costs and decided to switch testosterone brands, he began experiencing a health decline. In this heartwrenching essay for Grassroots Thinking3, he explores why he’s chosen to stop receiving gender-affirming care and why this decision is like “being killed slowly.”
Why does prison food tend to make incarcerated people ill over time? Jeremy Busby thoroughly answers this complex question in a piece for Prison Writers4 about how the food processing operations inside of jails and prisons violate public health standards.
In a powerful essay for The Flytrap5, Kwaneta Harris details how women who are incarcerated routinely experience gender-based violence. “For women in prison, one abuser is replaced with another,” she writes. “The U.S. calls this “justice.”
“Correctional industries” jobs exist in every state prison system. These jobs skirt legal loopholes to put incarcerated people to work creating license plates, textiles, breakfast cereals, and other goods and services needed by the outside world. In this investigative feature for Filter6, Tony Vick examines how agencies such as TRICOR are using incarcerated employees to save millions in labor costs for private companies while the employees receive few, if any, benefits.
Jeremy Busby goes two for two this month with an op-ed in The Intercept7 about how the current presidential administration is using the tactics the government has long used in prisons to suppress free speech on the outside.
We also have another one from Xandan Gulley! For Inquest8, he writes about how Texas continues to incarcerate people who have been freed on parole until they have an “approved” home to be released to.
Kwaneta Harris really had an amazing month! Ms. Magazine9 published her essay about how complicated menopause is for incarcerated women.
Kwaneta also published an op-ed in Truthout10 about how incarcerated women who are featured in the spectacle of true crime are stripped of their humanity.
There may be no bigger story in 2026 than the aggressive federal crackdown on immigration and the mass incarceration and deportation of immigrants. Our own Jeremy Busby, who also had an amazing month, interviewed journalists who have been jailed by ICE for Truthout. Their experiences are harrowing, eye-opening, and worth reading.
Team Reflections
Some quotes have stuck around since the early years of Empowerment Avenue, including “We have a job to do, because we’re working to put ourselves out of business.” It’s a lofty goal to envision a world where mainstream media not only includes incarcerated voices, but goes beyond that, to imagine an industry where people currently incarcerated are seated at the tables where decisions and power circulate.
We live in a world enamored with the advancement of technology, where innovators are treated like gods. Yet as a society, we’ve largely let the media industry off the hook when it says it’s “too difficult” to work with those inside—or even to imagine it.
So here we are, making it less complicated.
With the hope that these industries—art, publishing, film, journalism, news—have its “aha” moment and say: we can do this with EA. That system shifts. That normalcy grows. That the seeds we’ve planted in so many projects finally burst open and the roots begin to take hold.
And then, as the tree grows and matures, we can pull knowledge and stories from its branches—nourishment for all. That’s the vision, or at least how we imagine it could be.
We don’t need more Locked Up Abroad, 60 Days In, or any other sensationalized, harmful media. We need nourishment—content that feeds our souls and minds, that explores how complex we are as people.
So, even as we continue engaging with an industry that has been malnourished, we know our seeds are being planted nationwide. And food is on the way.
Want to connect with us more?
Follow us on Instagram | Donate to our work here | Learn more on our website here | Build with us at hello@empowermentave.org
Zócalo Public Square publishes original essays, columns, poems, and artwork that grapples with a broad range of subjects. It is unclear how much they pay.
Knock LA is a California-based journalism and commentary project that is “dedicated to giving a voice to the left and uplifting marginalized communities.” They pay on a sliding scale ranging from $200 to $500 depending on article length, research effort, costs involved, and need.
Grassroots Thinking is an independent publication focused on “the stories that matter to the Black working class.” They pay $.10/word with a minimum of $75 for each story.
Prison Writers publishes uncensored, personal stories and thoughtful essays from incarcerated writers. They pay between $15 and $20 for published stories.
The Flytrap is a worker-owned, intersectional, and expansive feminist media group that is bringing cultural criticism back to the internet. They pay $.50/word.
Filter’s mission is to advocate through journalism for rational and compassionate approaches to drug use, drug policy, and human rights. They pay $300 per essay.
The Intercept investigates powerful individuals and institutions to expose corruption and injustice. It is unclear how much they pay for stories.
Inquest is a forum for advancing bold ideas to end mass incarceration in the United States. They pay $250 per essay.
Ms. Magazine is a multi-issue and globally-focused media outlet interested in a plethora of topics—from policy and politics to popular culture and the arts, from education to the environment, from violence to abortion. It is unclear how much they pay.
Woohoo thats great!!