David Coogan

David Coogan is an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University where he teaches courses in prison literature, memoir writing, and rhetoric. He is the author of Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail, After Jail, Before Freedom, and the Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing and Mass Incarceration. Coogan is the founder of Open Minds, a program that brings college students into the Richmond City Jail to take courses in the Humanities with incarcerated people, and Write Your Way Out: A Criminal Justice Diversion Program. Instead of going to jail, low-level offenders come to the university to take the same therapeutic writing class that he regularly teaches at the jail.