Writing Freedom Fellows Readings
Join 2024 and 2025 Writing Freedom Fellows for two evenings of celebratory readings, featuring special guests Rachel Kushner and Deesha Philyaw.
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Housed within Haymarket Books, the Writing Freedom Fellowship aims to elevate the essential voices and contributions of writers impacted by the carceral system. About to enter its third year, the fellowship is awarded to 20 emerging and established poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers annually.
Writing Freedom Fellowship has been developed in partnership with the Mellon Foundation.
Tuesday, March 24th: The 2024 Fellows Reading celebrates the inaugural cohort and features 16 writers along with a special message from novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner, who serves on the Writing Freedom advisory board. Read more about the 2024 Writing Freedom fellows at https://writing-freedom.org/fellows/2024 and follow their work
Wednesday, April 1st: The 2025 Fellows Reading celebrates the fellowship’s second cohort and features 13 writers along with a special message from fiction writer Deesha Philyaw, who served on the 2025 selection committee. Read more about the 2025 Writing Freedom fellows at https://writing-freedom.org/fellows/2025 and follow their work.
***Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the live-streamed video on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and captioning will be provided.***
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2024 Fellows Reading:
C Fausto Cabrera (he/him) is an Artist, Writer, and the Director of Transformative Justice at Damascus Way ReEntry & ReCovery Center. His poetry is published widely. His art series, Inherited Scars, was shown at the Weisman Art Museum and Cargill Gallery. He is a 2025 Common Justice Practitioner Lab Fellow.
Zeke Caligiuri (he/they) is a multi-genre writer and editor from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am, and his work has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration, Caligiuri is now helping to build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition, empowering system-impacted people and reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.
Starr Davis (she/her) is a poet, essayist, and dedicated mother from Columbus, Ohio, now based in Houston, Texas. Her work has been featured in various literary platforms, and she has been recognized as a fellow at The Luminary, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and PEN America. Davis’ memoir I Am Mostly Bad Blood (Autumn House Press) is forthcoming this fall.
Stefani Echeverría-Fenn (she/they) is a queer nonfiction writer based in Oakland, California. Her writing explores motherhood, class, madness, disability, housing justice, and queer familial lineages that transcend bio-reproductive kinship bonds. Echeverría-Fenn’s work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets, Sententiae Antiquae, Eidolon, Bellevue Literary Review, and the National Queer Arts Festival. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow.
Dee Deidre Farmer (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, consultant, and Director of Fight4Justice Project. She is a trailblazer in transgender and prison litigation, and the architect of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Farmer v. Brennan. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic she disseminated her poems and essays within the Bureau of Prisons. Today, Ms. Farmer continues her mission to restore effective representation in collateral proceedings and to expand successful reentry for incarcerated people.
Victoria Newton Ford is a poet and essayist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her writing explores fungibility, violence, haunting, spectacles, intimacy, (re)memory, and death. She has received support from Crosstown Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, TORCH Literary Arts, MacDowell, and more. Ford’s writing appears in Scalawag, Literary Hub, Sojourners, Jai-Alai Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first manuscript and documentary, which examine slavery as an ever-present haunting in the lives of Black mothers and their children.
Dr. Keeonna Harris (she/her) is a memoirist, creative nonfiction writer, and abolitionist scholar, born and raised in Watts and other parts of South Central Los Angeles. In her writing, she focuses on the health disparities and radical organizing for women connected to systems of mass incarceration. Harris’ memoir Mainline Mama (Amistad Press, 2025) explores motherhood, familial relationships, and well-being for Black women in the United States.
Kwaneta Harris (she/her) is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist and Movements Against Mass Incarceration Social Change Fellow. Harris is an abolition feminist and her stories expose how the intersection of gender, race, and place contribute to state-sanctioned, gender-based violence. She is currently working on a book about the teenagers from juvenile who were her neighbors in adult solitary confinement.
Kenneth Hartman (he/him) is an award-winning writer and prison reform activist. His book Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars (Atlas & Co., 2009) won the 2010 Eric Hoffer Award for memoir. After serving more than thirty-seven years in prison, Hartman was paroled in 2017 and remains free. He is deeply involved in transforming the prison system and assisting the recently paroled.
Quntos KunQuest (he/him) is an incarcerated novelist, artist, and songwriter from Shreveport, Louisiana. He is the author of This Life: A Novel (Agate, 2021), which was awarded a 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Debut Fiction category. Learn how to support KunQuest's campaign for exoneration here.
Ken Lamberton (he/him) writes about the nature of the Southwest. He is the author of Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations from Prison, which won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published hundreds of essays and six books, most recently Chasing Arizona. Lamberton leads a weekly workshop in Tucson for former prisoners and others from the community.
John J. Lennon (he/him) is a contributing editor at Esquire and the author of The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us (Celadon, 2025). His writing regularly appears in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and New York magazine, and his work has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing.
Ian Manuel (he/him) is the author of the memoir My Time Will Come (Pantheon, 2022). Through his poetry and creative nonfiction, Manuel explores growing up in prison and solitary confinement, where he spent eighteen years of his life from ages fifteen to thirty-three. Manuel lives in NYC where he works at The Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and travels the country giving presentations as an author for Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.
Ahmed Naji (he/him) is a bilingual writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and official criminal from Egypt. His novels are Rogers (2007), Using Life (2014), And Tigers to My Room (2020), Happy Endings (2023), and most recently, a memoir, Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison (McSweeney’s, 2023), which was a Finalist at the National Book Critics Circle. Presently he is exiled in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the editor most recently of Egypt + 100 from Comma Press.
Katie Schmid (she/they) is a poet, fiction writer, and creative nonfiction writer from Illinois. Her work explores female embodiment, motherhood, the effects of incarceration, and how the influences of capitalism and carceral justice affect the bodies and minds of the people living in the United States. Schmid is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and the author of the poetry collection Nowhere (University of New Mexico Press, 2021).
Crystal Wilkinson (she/her) is an award-winning author, and past Poet Laureate of Kentucky (2021-2023). Her books include Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, The Birds of Opulence, and Perfect Black. She has won an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction and edits Screen Door Press, publishing diverse fiction throughout the Black diaspora. Wilkinson’s memoir Heartsick is forthcoming from Crown.
Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels Creation Lake, The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; and a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction.
2025 Fellows Reading:
B Batchelor (he/him) is a poet and writer based in Minnesota. He has won multiple awards from PEN America and was a 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize in Poetry finalist. His poetry has appeared in The Nation, Columbia Journal, cream city review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Disfigured Hours, was published this winter from Lost Kite Editions.
Jeremiah Bourgeois (he/him) is a nonfiction and legal writer whose work focuses on sentencing and corrections. He authored The Extraordinary Ordinary Prisoner: Essays From Inside America’s Carceral State. His scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of Criminal Law and the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. Bourgeois served as a law clerk for Washington Court of Appeals Judge George B. Fearing. In December 2025, Bourgeois was appointed Director of the Washington State Office of the Corrections Ombuds by Governor Bob Ferguson.
Dante Clark (he/they) is a poet and performer from the Bronx, NY. Clark explores, through writing poems, the scope and sound of words that inform, delight, and incite toward liberation. He's a recent Goldwater Fellow and MFA Graduate from New York University’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.
Ajanaé is an interdisciplinary poet, conceptual artist, and theologian. As a theologian, she blends criticism, memoir, and theology as autotheory to explore the relationship between Black church history, spirituality, and artistic practice. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and more. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, won the New Delta Review’s prize. Ajanaé was a co-host of the VS Podcast. She is the Founder and Spiritual Architect of OILY.
Emile Suotonye DeWeaver (he/him) is a formerly incarcerated activist, journalist, and author of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine. He's from Oakland, CA, and he has proud roots in Rivers State, Nigeria. He works in Oakland as a writing coach and as a facilitator invested in men's healing.
Michael Fischer (he/him) is a nonfiction writer, Moth Mainstage storyteller, and senior manager at Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement, where he helps build robust education and employment pathways for currently and formerly incarcerated people. His writing appears in the New York Times, The Sun, Guernica, Orion, Lit Hub, Longreads, Salon, The Rumpus, Brevity, and elsewhere.
Elizabeth Hawes (she/her) writes prose, plays, and poetry. The recipient of a 2023 Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize with the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and multiple PEN America Writing Awards, her recent work can be found in Defector, Lux, Prism, black lipstick, The Rumpus, Santa Clara Review, Zócalo Public Square, and The Sun.
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is an Afro-Latinx writer, interdisciplinary artist, ritual practitioner, and cultural strategist working through an interdimensional, multimodal practice. Their solo exhibition Digital Archives of the Unseen: Poetry and Portraits from the Age of Censorship and Detention (2026) centers digital witnessing and carceral memory. Hicks is the author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket, 2024), winner of the 2025 Midwest Book Award and 2025 CWA Book of the Year, and HoodWitch (Acre, 2019), a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Their memoir A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket, 2027) extends this inquiry.
Nicole Shawan Junior (they/she) is a creative nonfiction and speculative fiction literary artist. A Tin House “Debut Author Over 40” residency recipient, Hedgebrook writer-in-residence, Lambda Literary Emerging Queer Voice, New York Foundation for the Arts Geri Ashur Fellow, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference contributing writer, Junior has received myriad writing residencies and fellowships. Junior is working on two novels and a memoir.
Monterica Sadé Neil (she/her) was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and received her MFA from Louisiana State University. She has been a Tin House Scholar and a Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, among other honors. Neil’s writing has appeared in the Offing, the nonprofit news organization MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a memoir.
Geneva Phillips (she/her) is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Raised and incarcerated in Oklahoma, she is the author of the memoir Disappearing in Glimpses (Mongrel Empire Press, 2020). Her writing has been honored and included in four published PEN America Prison Writing Awards anthologies. She looks forward to unpacking her future upon release in late 2026.
Julie Poole (she/her) is a writer based in Austin, Texas. She has published two books of poetry, Bright Specimen and Gorgeous Freak. Her essays and journalism can be found in the Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Bon Appétit, HuffPost, the Baffler, Slate, and the Nation. Poole is currently working on a memoir about the intersection of poverty and mental illness.
Carla J. Simmons (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer who has been incarcerated in the American South since 2004. She critically examines the roles of imperialism, capitalism, racism, poverty, and class in the carceral system. Her work has been featured in Lux, Prism, The Appeal, and Truthout, and nominated for the Stillwater Award. Simmons is currently completing a memoir.
Deesha Philyaw is the author of the award-winning short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Philyaw is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction with Dawnie Walton and Reckon True Stories with Kiese Laymon. She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction. Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming.
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