Join Us This Giving Tuesday
Plus, exciting updates on fundraising, funding, partnerships, and published work
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Welcome back to another edition of Empowerment Ave News!
This Giving Tuesday, we welcome financial support to further our mission of liberating the writing, art, and creativity of folks in prison. You can donate here. Thank you for all and any support. We are truly grateful for this powerful community we have built.
Empowerment Avenue is excited to announced that on September 28, the Mellon Foundation agreed to provide us with operational funding for the next three years, as part of a larger grant initiative that will invest in writing and artwork from prison. This was after a nine-month grant writing process in which our team detailed what we have accomplished as a collective and outlined our vision for growth and increased impact. We truly see Empowerment Avenue writers and artists as leaders in social justice, journalism, writing, and the creative arts. We are honored that Mellon believes in that vision as well. Their funding will increase our capacity to serve and also opens up opportunities for Empowerment Avenue to fund the ideas of incarcerated people.
For Writing for Liberation, we plan to launch another outreach initiative to bring on new volunteers, so we can onboard and support new writers who represent a range of voices, experiences, and locations across the country. (If you know someone interested in volunteering, email us at empowermentave@gmail.com.) We are streamlining our support to incarcerated writers who have already begun their publishing journey, as we feel this is where the program can have the most impact. We will also prioritize onboarding women and LGBTQ+ writers, who have not been sufficiently represented in our cohort.
Our Visual Arts for Liberation track currently has two cohorts—San Quentin and we recently added the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla. Moving forward, we will seek to add cohorts from other prisons in other states. We are currently working with the Chowchilla cohort to produce an interactive visual art exhibition curated from within the prison by Tomiekia Johnson and Chantell Gosztyla called The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison Through Art and Poetry. This is a follow up partnership with Flyaway Productions and Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) that will culminate in an online exhibition at MoAD in September of 2023 and an in-person installation at Minnesota Street Project (a series of gallery spaces in San Francisco). Through the run of the project all artwork will be for sale. Rahsaan and Christine will also be working on writing a Guide for Inside Curators, to be distributed both inside and outside to organizations who want to work with an inside curator.
Another major focus of our efforts for 2023 is to host an Artist Power Convening. We were selected by our peers for a small amount of funding by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) to host a diverse group of art professionals to provide feedback and guidance on Visual Arts for Liberation with the goal of learning and connecting. The conversation will help us to brainstorm ways to build an audience as well as a collector base and plant seeds for coalition building and future partnerships. We’ll be inviting curators, art market professionals, gallery owners, formerly incarcerated artists, and related social justice organizations. All of this will be recorded so that we can share transcripts with our cohorts inside.
The thing we are most excited about is that for all three years of our Mellon funding, we’ll have a flexible fund specifically to support projects from Empowerment Avenue writers and artists. This fund will grow year over year, with the goal that we can increasingly distribute the leadership and program growth of EA to writers and artists inside.
Empowerment Avenue started as an idea Rahsaan came up with and Emily was open to doing the work to make the concept a reality. Christine Lashaw joined in 2021 and uses her experience working at the Oakland Museum of California for 23 years to organize the expansion of our visual artists program. Our growth in two years has been incredible and we’re looking forward to seeing what ideas the next incarcerated person comes up with and how much further we can go together.
Let’s do this!
Love,
Rahsaan, Emily, Christine
Our Latest Work
For The Guardian, EA writer Felix Sitthivong exposed a health crisis inside Washington State prisons. In partnership with outside journalist Sam Levin, the pair wrote about how a diabetic man pleaded for insulin before his death.
Antoine Davis is an incarcerated writer who's a part of EA writer Christopher Blackwell’s writing mentorship program. He recently published a story in Counter Punch1 about his connection with a correctional officer.
For The Marshall Project2, EA writer Ryan Moser wrote the powerful piece “Between Addiction and Prison, I Left My Boy Without a Dad” about the pain he caused his son and his hopes for healing their relationship. “I felt like a phantom parent who floated in and out of D.’s life just like those hot air balloons — totally present and loving when we were together, and uninvolved when we were apart,” Ryan writes.
As part of our partnership with Study and Struggle3, Demetrius “Meech” Buckley wrote a lyrical review of Assata: "Cubicles, tight corridors, living spaces; housing projects, cracked streets, assault rifles; cells, solitary, the hole; blood on clothes. Body. Spirit."
Inside/Outside Insights
We loved this written exchange between EA volunteer Jamie Cohen and EA writer Christopher Blackwell for The Progressive. Jamie and Chris were the program’s first pairing and have accomplished incredible things together. This is a beautiful documentation of their close friendship and creative collaboration.
EA writer Meech Buckley won honorable mention for The Ghost Story’s4 Supernatural Fiction Award contest. Here's his winning essay, Heard of a Power.
San Quentin News writer Juan Haines has teamed up with Solitary Watch to launch the Ridgeway Reporting Project, which is offering grants to incarcerated journalists to report on conditions of confinement. Please share this opportunity with incarcerated writers you know.
The Death Panel podcast spoke with EA writer Jessica Phoenix Sylvia about prison book bans, how simple it is for prison officials to administratively withhold basic needs, and the necessity of publishing incarcerated writers. Listen to it below or here.
We are building Empowerment Avenue’s volunteer base! Do you or someone you know have writing/editing experience and would like to support an incarcerated writer getting work outside prison walls? We can connect and support you in these transformational relationships. Email us at empowermentave@gmail.com.
Bonus Content
In support of EA writer Eric Paris Whitfield in his quest for clemency in New York, you can sign the petition here and donate to his reentry fund here. His friends and family put together the video below to help share his story.
Want to connect with us more?
Follow us on Twitter and Instagram | Donate to our work here | Learn more on our website here | Build with us at empowermentave@gmail.com
Counter Punch is an online news publication with an independent left-leaning perspective.
The Marshall Project’s Life Inside series publishes weekly first-person essays from people who live or work in the criminal justice system. Pieces are between 1,000 and 1,400 words, and the rate per story is $100.
Study and Struggle is publishing book reviews written by, edited by, and designed for incarcerated folks. They pay $50 per review.