Confronting mass incarceration and catalyzing debate through writing and the arts.

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** Meet the 2019-2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellows!
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Dear Friends,

After a successful first cohort experience with the 2018 Writing For Justice Fellows, whose work is currently being picked up by exciting publications, we are thrilled to welcome our new 2019-2020 Fellows!

The Fellowship, which commissions written works of lasting merit that illuminate critical issues related to mass incarceration and catalyze public debate, received more than 800 proposals. We invite you to meet the 8 selected Fellows and their mentors, and learn about their projects below.

If you’re in the New York City area on November 1, 2019, help us welcome the Fellows at Authoring Advocacy: ([link removed][UNIQID]) Bearing Witness in an Era of Mass Incarceration ([link removed][UNIQID]) , a reading featuring 2018 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellows Justin Rovillos Monson and Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Witness Program writers Roshan Abraham, Christina Olivares, & Sarah Wang. A closing conversation will explore the ethics, challenges and necessity of writing about mass incarceration from a variety of perspectives and lived experiences.

Please see the Writing for Justice Fellowship website ([link removed][UNIQID]) for more information about the Fellows, and for a list of Fellowship finalists and semifinalists.

Thank you,

Caits Meissner
Prison and Justice Writing Program Director
PEN America
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** Introducing the 2019-2020 PEN America
Writing For Justice Fellows
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Arthur Longworth
Monroe, Washington

Through the voice of a state-raised prisoner, Arthur Longworth ([link removed][UNIQID]) will work on Journal of a State-Raised Prisoner in the Age of Mass Incarceration, a book-length compilation of creative nonfiction essays that elucidates the foster-care-to-prison pipeline.

Longworth will be working with journalist Maurice Chammah.

Cleyvis Natera
Montclair, New Jersey

Cleyvis Natera’s ([link removed][UNIQID]) personal essay will illuminate mass incarceration’s painful impact on members of an Afro-Dominican immigrant family and their surrounding community through the story of her own brother’s arrest for minor offenses and subsequent deportation.

Natera will be working with writer Nelly Rosario.

C.T. Mexica
Phoenix, Arizona

C.T. Mexica ([link removed][UNIQID]) will work on 18 With a Bullet: Or, With Love & Respect, a nonfiction memoir of intergenerational incarceration, anchored in the author’s incarceration from the age of 13 to 21 for acts of mutual violence committed against other bonded males, and transformation to a postdoctoral researcher and emerging writer.

Mexica will be working with memoirist Piper Kerman.

J.D. Mathes
Tehachapi, California

J.D. Mathes ([link removed][UNIQID]) will work on In Strange Company, a novel that reveals a free nation’s dark impulse toward punishing the mentally ill and the addicted, told through the story of a young man struggling with the trauma of prison to find peace, grace, and humanity through learning music.

Mathes will be working with writer and editor Kerri Arsenault.

Jonah Mixon-Webster
Flint, Michigan

Jonah Mixon-Webster ([link removed][UNIQID]) will create Protocol, an immersive two-fold documentary poetics project. The full length hybrid manuscript and digital archive aims to unpack—through dashcam footage, guerrilla audio recordings, arrest documents, and lyrical narration—the procedural relations between police officers and civilians in 21st century America.

Mixon-Webster will be working with the Vera Institute of Justice's Policing Program Director Rebecca Neusteter.

Justine van der Leun
Brooklyn, New York

Justine van der Leun ([link removed][UNIQID]) will combine narrative journalism, primary data collection and analysis, and investigative techniques to report on the structural, historic, cultural, and legal forces behind the criminalization of women’s defense and survival from abuse.

van der Leun will be working with investigative journalist Jordan Smith.

Sterling Cunio
Salem, Oregon

Sterling Cunio ([link removed][UNIQID]) will write and produce Austin’s Echo, a cross-time dramatic dialogue between Austin Reed—who in the 1830s was the first African American to write a memoir about his incarceration—and a 21st-century prisoner. The similarities of prison dynamics, reform debates and social issues are compared through poetic narration, theatrical elements and music to demonstrate how prison is virtually the same after 185 years.

Cunio will be working with hip hop theater artist Baba Israel.

Vivian D. Nixon
New York, New York

Vivian D. Nixon ([link removed][UNIQID]) will write a personal essay as a precursor to a book-length memoir chronicling her passage from a stable suburban home through phases of mental illness, addiction, incarceration and re-invention. The work exposes the complex individual and structural drivers of mass criminalization through the lens of race and gender.

Nixon will be working with writer Kiese Laymon.

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