Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (A PEN American Center Prize Anthology) - Softcover

Bell Gale Chevigny

3.87

89 ratings by Goodreads

9781559705141: Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (A PEN American Center Prize Anthology)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559705140 ISBN 13: 9781559705141

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2000

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"Doing Time," For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity.
For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide. Bell Chevigny, a writer herself and a former prison teacher, has selected the best of these to create Doing Time - a timely, beautiful, sometimes devastating, but vital work, which demonstrates resoundingly that prison writing is a vibrant branch of American literature.

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About the Author:

"Bell Gale Chevigny is professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and a Soros Senior Justice Fellow. She has written for the Nation and DoubleTake and other journals. Her books include The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings and Chloe and Olivia, a novel."

From Kirkus Reviews:

This anthology of material by winners of PEN Americas annual prison writing contests provides a polyphonic chorus of rejoinder to our policies of maximum incarceration. The collections prose is honed and direct, with many contributors striking a hypnotic balance between the urgency inherent in writing as survival and the punishingly absurd nature of their circumstances: though their literary imaginations range widely, bodily, theyre going no place. Most at issue is the individual readers openness toward otherwise shunned figures. Several pieces are from longtime death-row inmates, presenting lucid, provocative narratives that dont excuse their youthful brutality. A thick sheaf of entries represent the hapless POWs of the Drug War (often disadvantaged women), serving long sentences for semantic and violence-free crimes. The distribution of fiction, poetry, and essays into 11 topical sections (e.g. Players, Games) allows a textured diversity of excellent pieces, such as Paul Mulryans scorching account of the 11-day Lucasville, Ohio, riot; Jimmy Santiago Bacas poetic reach toward lost family; Dax Xenoss O. Henry-winning fiction, Death of a Duke; and Robert Moriartys droll, harrowing memoir, Pilots in the War on Drugs. Introductory essays by Dead Man Walking author Sister Helen Prejean and SUNY Purchase professor emeritus Chevigny provide a moral chassis; the latters piece charts the prison writing movement as a response to the fluctuations of penal theory between reform and retribution, offering a chilling vision of our current maximum-time, hard-labor model as a machine of social control, devouring ever more persons of color and of the underclass even as the crime rate declines. Essential reading for those concerned by this imbalanceand it should be more than essential for lawmakers and citizens who support the hard bargain of liberty for order without considering the darkness created. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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