Like many fellow essayists, we spent the weekend of November 1-4 in Phoenix, Arizona at the NonfictioNOW conference catching up with old friends and making new ones. We also sat on a panel on ethics of writing with and about the incarcerated. The panel included chair John Proctor, writing teacher at Manhattanville College and Rikers Island; Sarah Shotland, director of the Words Without Walls program at Chatham University; Pittsburgh journalist and essayist Brittany Hailer; Bob Cowser, who teaches at St. Lawrence University and participates in the university’s Inside Out Prison Exchange Program at Riverview Correctional Facility; and Chauna Craig, Creative Nonfiction Editor at the Atticus Review and teacher in the Second Chance Pell Program.
Perhaps the best thing about our panel was the many-branched conversation we had in response to questions the audience asked. We employed a method of question-gathering gleaned from a presentation at NYU by the Criminal Justice Initiative, passing out notecards beforehand, having runners (in this case John’s father and brother) pick them up as people wrote questions on them, and ordering and addressing them as they came up naturally in our conversation. We’d recommend this method, which made for a vibrant, efficient discussion with an involved audience.
That said, we only had an hour and fifteen minutes, and we didn’t get to many of the questions. So, we thought we would give a list of those questions with written responses from our panel here.
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