The essays below have been selected from the American Prison Writing Archive as source material for the exhibition.

Participating artists are invited to select one or more essays from the list below and create an original artwork in response. Your work does not need to literally illustrate the events described in the essay. Instead, consider what stays with you after reading: an image, phrase, emotion, question, contradiction, memory, or idea. Your response might engage with the essay’s narrative as a whole, focus closely on a single passage or detail, or move outward from the text through your own associations and experiences.

The excerpts below are intended as entry points rather than summaries. We strongly encourage artists to read the complete essay before beginning their work. Each essay title, listed in green, links directly to the full text in the American Prison Writing Archive.

Content Note

These essays reflect the lived experiences of people who are or have been incarcerated. Some include descriptions of harsh or dehumanizing conditions inside prisons, as well as experiences that occurred prior to incarceration. Readers may encounter discussions of physical and sexual abuse, violence, trauma, isolation, medical neglect, and other potentially distressing subjects.

We encourage readers to approach these essays with care and to make their own decisions about what they feel comfortable reading and responding to.

1. Darrell Sharpe - “A Brand New Beginning Awaits Us All” (Massachusetts, 2017)
   
   Excerpt: About halfway up the window, he slipped and fell, dropping a few hundred of his own body lengths and smacking his tiny self against the windowsill. It's impossible, but I swear I heard the impact.
   
   

2. J.D. Frandsen - “Being of Light: Meditation and Transcendence” (Wyoming, 2015)
   
   Excerpt: A wave of genuine peace, well-being, and unconditional love surrounds me, envelops me, permeates my soul and resonates through the bricks, the barbed wire and throughout the infinite reaches of the universe.
   
   

3. Larry E. May - “My Obituary “(California, 2020)
   
   Excerpt: Everything was fine for me until I saw an old Black friend of mine, and I hugged him. The skinheads approached me aggressively and gave me my first and last warning. Actually, it was my second warning from an earlier, similar incident. On that occasion, I'd gone after a loose handball that rolled into the Asian's "territory." I instantly went to retrieve it and almost caused a riot. Running into another race’s area is seen as a threat; they think they're being attacked. As I ran “out of bounds,” the yard went eerily quiet, everyone froze, and all eyes were on me, including the guards.
   
   

4. Bobby Bostic - “In the Garden” (Missouri, 2018)
   
   Excerpt: With every weed that I pulled out of the garden it felt as if I was pulling an old part of my criminal self away.
   
   

5. Brad Carney - “The Vertical Neighborhood From Hell” (California, 2014)
   
   Excerpt: Walking over the threshold of West Block transports you to another world. The transition is startling, leaving the fresh air and sunshine behind when you enter this medieval dungeon. The first thing you notice is the radical change in air quality; it is a foul mixture of body odor, dirty laundry, and second-hand smoke from cigarettes and marijuana. It has a palpable thickness to it.
   
   

6. Joe Delores Mendez - “I sit. I stand.“ (California, 2017)
   
   Excerpt: Again, I sit. I stand, and walk a few feet, but this time I shorted my steps, because, in this small space there is only so far you go. My family, my friends, my dead mother, they all worry about me, but I tell them things like, "I'm strong," "I'm courageous," and it's through all of you that, I find things like, "warmth" and "strength," and it's true.
   
   

7. Carrie Fine - “Dehumanization at Lowell Prison” (Florida, 2022)
   
   Excerpt: Health ignored, body wear
   Losing teeth and even hair
   Corporally punished, religion denied
   Though I long to, I can’t cry
   
   

8. Randal LeFevre - “Dying Inside” (Michigan, 2016)
   
   Excerpt: Before passing, mom bought herself the diamond ring she always wanted, and planted fresh flowers directly on the floor in a heap of dirt. She gave herself the burial she knew she'd never receive as a pauper in the state of Georgia.
   
   

9. Lawrence Smith - “Under Privileged” (Missouri, 2018)
   
   Excerpt: My experience here in Southeast Correctional Center caused me to review my own sense of bigotry while looking in the eyes of my abusers over and over again. Beside facing injustice in the courts, behind prison gates and walls black offenders recieve harsher treatment than white offenders. The advancement for people of color is often met with society's umbilical cord of injustice and segregation strangling them purposefully from having a real chance at life.
   
   

10. Jarvis Jay Masters - “The Inmate and the Prison Guard or the Night the Walls Came Down” (California, 2013)
    
    Excerpt: As men we learned to experience our lives, in those few moments, without shame or fear, in our own longing more than anything else, to be better human beings.
    
    

11. John Katehis - “Solitary Confinement: My Typical Day as a Teenager in the Box on Riker’s Island” (New York, 2023)
    
    Excerpt: 10pm. The four of us that share an air vent exchange stories by yelling thru it. Most of it is probably made up. We don’t care. A good story is better than a real one. Girls, videogames, violence, drugs, money, houses, cars, sex, and whatever else our damaged teenage minds can conjure up to pass the night.
    
    

12. Laura L. Purviance - “The Modified Steel Bed” (California, 2018)
    
    Excerpt: We resist by meeting the ignorance of staff with easily overheard nonchalant conversation about our own sentences, and how someday this could also be our fate. We humanize it; we openly communicate exactly what this is, what its purpose is, how personal that is. The staff get quiet, they no longer speak on this metal elephant in the shop. Reality is hard, so its ignored. My peers and I understand this, but the undercurrent of contempt never fully goes away.
    
    

13. Bienvenido Rodriguez, Jr. - “This is my story based on firsthand experience” (Pennsylvania, 2019)
    
    Excerpt: My Orisha Eleque beaded necklaces were tossed in a near-by trash-can. I went to the trash-can to pick it up; which the Lieutenant took it as an act of aggression. With the Orisha Eleque beaded necklaces in my hand, and in anger I attempted to articulate the history behind the Yoruba Ifá Santería religion, the precepts of the obligatory practices, and the religious significance behind the wearing of the Orisha Eleque beaded necklaces and the color combination of the beads. It fell on deaf ears and the Orisha Eleque beaded necklaces were destroyed.
    
    

14. T.L. Maynard - “Running” (Michigan, 2019)
    
    Excerpt: At 16, I ran to the military. A ward of the court, but still "his" possession. The recruiter petitioned the court on my behalf; one of my few true memories. This giant man of war coming back from the courts with two fearful words, that was it: "I'm sorry." And... it was never mentioned again. Just like everyone else, no one knew what to say or do, so they just pretended it never happened. Loneliness like thirst in the ocean, water all around without a drop to drink. When the military turned its back, I ran again.
    
    

15. Larry Carter - “Grandaddy, Come Home” (Michigan, 2019)
    
    Excerpt: One day we will be free." They kept on saying that for 250 years. "One day" is not justice. "One day" is what you say when there is no justice. I ended my hunger strike on the 15th of August, 2013. My fight goes on. There is justice to be had in America. There are babies out there who want to go fishing. I have great limitations. But, if it is the last thing I ever do, I will be trying to help those babies get their granddaddies home.
    
    

16. Kwaneta Harris - “I Was So Careful” (Texas, 2022)
    
    Excerpt: After taking bird baths in my cell sink for months and washing my basketball sized afro in it, I relented. I craved a proper bathing.
    
    

17. Tasha Brown - “Unfit Adolescent” (California, 2020)
    
    Excerpt: An adolescent cannot: purchase alcohol, consent to sex, rent a hotel room, purchase cigarettes, sign a legally binding contract, vote, or gamble; at is I couldn't even obtain a California ID or driver's license, however, I could be tried and sentenced as an adult. These facts do not absolve me of guilt for my criminal behavior, however, my criminal behavior did not persist into adulthood, but my life sentence has. Travel back with me to when you were 15…
    
    

18. Monique Houston - “Break the Silence” (Louisiana, 2022)
    
    Excerpt:  As I listen to each woman state what’s the hardest part of doing time, I realize immediately there’s no right or wrong answer. Why? Well, the truth is we are all doing time. We are all doing time and it can be a struggle. The hardest part of doing time, is doing time.
    
    

19. Robert Saleem Holbrook - “From Public Enemy to Enemy of the State” (Pennsylvania, 2008)
    
    Excerpt: When I was a child I used to often walk past the old Eastern State Penitentiary on Fairmount Avenue in North Philadelphia and stare in awe at its high walls and ramparts seemingly towering into the sky believing naively that the old prison was an ancient castle from the days of knights and kings. There were times myself and other kids my age used to try and scale the walls to get a glimpse of what was inside, how ironic it is that now for the past 18 years I’ve been trying to figure out how to scale out of the numerous prisons I’ve been imprisoned in since the age of 16.
    
    

20. Corey John Richardson - “How Some Men Find Love..” (Kentucky, 2016)
    
    Excerpt: After having truly been loved for the first time in my life I found that I was finally proud to be myself without reservations. I was glad to have been born gay, and maybe now I could find real love once again upon my release, but this time with another gay man. Imagine that? Mother Teresa said once that we humans are angels with only one wing and that we need each other to fly. He helped me get from that place of loss and confusion to the sure-footing of where I am today. I hardly knew that it was happening. What an odd place for it all to have occurred.
    
    

21. Chanell Burnette - “The Cost of Prison Living” (Virginia, 2021)
    
    Excerpt: I think many people out there are under the assumption that it is cheap or even free to live in prison. Well, I am here to tell you firsthand that it is not. The cost of living within these walls is extremely high, and is steadily rising sadly. I do not care to think or to know just how much money I have spent during these past 16 years of incarceration.
    
    

22. Chanell Burnette - “The Red, Unfortunate, and Blue Part 1” (Virginia, 2020)
    
    Excerpt: In this facility, the medical personnel such as the doctors and nurse practitioners who evaluate us for treatment are split into two teams: The Red Team and The Blue Team. If your last name begins with letters of A-K, you are a patient of the Red Team. If your last name begins with the letter of L-Z, the Blue Team. The Unfortunate?...The Red Team, of course, of which I am a patient. 
    
    

23. C.F. Villa - “California Elegy” (California, 2016)
    
    Excerpt: Today, I could be found at my cell front. My fingers stuffed through the perforated metal door—I hang limp—a mechanism forged of heavy gauge. My head angled in a daze. My mind lost in a dense fog of nothingness. I’m withering away, I know it, and I no longer care. Hopelessness is a virus that occupies a quiet space under my tongue like some forgotten stone. But in truth: I am the forgotten one. I am the sum of the parts that make up the whole. Concentration: an abstract invention for those with half a mind if half a mind were the thing to waste. And someone screams behind me, waste not want not.
    
    

24. Keith Lincoln - “Survival” (Texas, 2017)
    
    Excerpt: I am not the same scared little boy who was thrown into this penitentiary. I am much more than he was; and, because I know and respect who I am today in spite of WHERE I am, I can honestly say that I am surviving prison.
    
    I may just outlive this life sentence yet...
    
    

25. Tony Enis - “Least Likely Places” (Illinois, 2020)
    
    Excerpt: Quicker than I thought, that love and appreciation I mentioned earlier began to grow. I was turning a blank piece of canvas into something more. I was creating with my own hands. There was something extremely fulfilling and liberating about that. Once I had a grasp of the basics, I decided to buy myself some higher quality materials. As soon as I began to use them it felt like I had upgraded from a junker to a Mercedes-Benz. My work improved almost instantly. I was often my harshest critic when it came to my painting (it's a Virgo thing🙂), but I knew it had arrived so to speak, when an officer asked me if I intended to sell this particular seascape I was working on.
    
    

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT:
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2026

ABout the Collaborators

American Prison Writing Archive

The mission of the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is to replace misrepresentation of prisons and imprisoned people with first-person witness by those living in legalized confinement. No single essay can tell us all that we need to know, but a mass-scale national Archive can begin to strip away widely circulated myths and replace them with a sense of the true human costs of the current legal order. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing, and disseminating the work of imprisoned people and volunteers, we hope to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know prisons best.

The APWA aims to triple its current holdings, with particular efforts to expand witness from people in the Archive who are women, gender non-conforming, Spanish-speaking, and representative residents from all states and territories. We invite all APWA visitors who are formerly incarcerated, work with, or know incarcerated people to help us in increasing contributions that document the prison experience.

Johns Hopkins Wavelengths

Research fuels the engine of progress; the Johns Hopkins Wavelengths public engagement program brings the benefits of university discoveries to the world through the development and promotion of strategic content for diverse audiences, inspired by its research community.

In classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and around the world, Hopkins experts are expanding understanding of complex challenges and opportunities. Wavelengths brings listeners, readers, viewers, and visitors inside their stories, presenting discoveries, innovations, and viewpoints that benefit people locally and globally. Through nonfiction books—and the media coverage, events, exhibits, and partnership projects they inspire—researchers’ insights spark curiosity and conversation across the web, radio, television, and public life.

Wavelengths is a partnership between the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. We encourage a diversity of authors, topics and perspectives and ensures content that is approachable, accurate, and engaging. The program supports the University's "Knowledge for the World" vision by bridging the academic and public spheres.