Judith Tannenbaum

Please watch the incredible book trailer Michel Wenzer has made for By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives.

Creating Behind the Razor Wire is an excellent resource for those wanting to know more about prison arts and for practitioners hungry for connection to colleagues. The book's author, Krista Brune, received a fellowship that allowed her to research dozens of programs across the United States, and this book documents her research. There are essays by people in prison, teaching artists, program administrators, and college students. There's an advice section from three of us old-timers (Buzz Alexander of Prison Creative Arts Project, Grady Hillman and me), and an extensive program directory and resource list.

The book's available for purchase and some of its information is available online.

New Village Press will publish By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, a two-person memoir Spoon Jackson and I are writing together. We will talk about prison, poetry, education, inequity, beauty, possibility, and what it means to be human. The process of our conversations -- in person at San Quentin, and in letters over the nineteen years since then -- is one Spoon calls diving, and both conversation and diving give shape to By Heart. You can read more about Spoon who is currently at CSP-Sac serving Life without Possibility of Parole.

New Village Press also published Arlene Goldbard's excellent New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development. And here's another brand new New Village Press book I strongly recommend: Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World's Frontlines by William Cleveland.

Also, I have one more new book to recommend. Uncommon Community: One Congregation's Work with Prisoners documents and discusses three prison programs begun by a Unitarian congregation in Texas. The work is interesting, the perspective broad and deep.