What We're Reading: May 2024

This edition of What We're Reading is the prison writing edition. The four things mentioned below were written by individuals who have spent time behind bars, whether it's as employees or as incarcerated persons. 

The Diary of a Rikers Island Library Worker

The New Yorker, May 12, 2023

Author and illustrator Medar de la Cruz is the recipient of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Illustrated Reporting and Commentary for this piece published last year reflecting on his work bringing books to incarcerated people at Rikers Island. The link above goes to the public New Yorker website, which is the only place this piece was published. Side note, you can access the New Yorker several ways through SFPL--it's on Flipster, an e-magazines platform SFPL provides, and we have it in print on the 5th floor of the Main Library, to name a few options.

 __________________________________

Surgery in Shackles

Lux, Winter 2023

Originally appearing in the print version of Lux issue 9 (Winter 2023), this article by Carla Simmons and illustrated by Huanhuan Wang is now freely available on the Lux website. Simmons describes the inhumane and inadequate treatment she received through the course of experiencing abdominal pain while incarcerated in Georgia. She is not alone. Her experience is indicative of the universal need to overhaul the prison medical system.

__________________________________

He carved himself with an ID card and I just felt numb. 

Sunday Times, April 28, 2024

As a teenager, author Gen Glaister had a strange career aspiration to work in a prison, and in this excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Prison Officer, she describes the wonderment and repulsion she felt as she got to know the inmates at the prison where she took a job as a young woman. While SFPL does not (yet) have Glaister's book in the collection, you can read the Sunday Times excerpt online through our database subscriptions (hyperlinked in title) or in the print newspaper available at the 5th floor page desk. We keep the print edition of the Sunday Times for three months, so you will have to come by the end of July to see it in print.

__________________________________

Hulihia

Fall 2013

Hulihia is serial publication from the Women's Community Correctional Center in Kailua, HI which has been digitized as part of Reveal Digital's American Prison Newspapers open access digital collection. This issue from 2013 has the theme of "Conversations with myself," and the contributed pieces are responding to the great works of literature studied in the prison's creative writing class. Looking at the American Prison Newspapers digital collection as a whole, Hulihia is one of only a half dozen newspapers that come from a women's correctional facility and is the most current of that subset, making it a timely and important addition to the genre of women's prison writing.