Censorship and Resistance: A Prison Banned Book Week Conversation

This Prison Banned Books Week, join the ACLU’s National Prison Project and Haymarket Books to learn how prisons prevent incarcerated people from reading. In this conversation, speakers will discuss how prisons’ censorship appeals process is a bureaucratic obstruction to the First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances.

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Speakers:

Stevie Wilson is a formerly imprisoned Black, queer, abolitionist organizer and multi-genre writer from Philadelphia. His work interrogates the meanings of freedom, community, belonging, identity, and truth. Wilson is the founder of the inside abolitionist study collective 9971 and founder of the abolitionist journal In The Belly. He was a 2022 Marvel Cooke Fellow and a 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow. Currently, he is a fellow at Critical Resistance and fellowship coordinator for The Work and Us.

Corene Kendrick is the Deputy Director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project where she directs litigation and policy advocacy on behalf of incarcerated people across the country. Previously she was a staff attorney at the Prison Law Office in Berkeley, California, where she worked on multiple class action cases on behalf of people in prisons and jails in California and Arizona. She also was a staff attorney at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, where she led policy advocacy, impact litigation, and public education on behalf of children in foster care and juvenile justice systems in numerous jurisdictions across the country, and was a Skadden Fellow at Children’s Rights in New York.

Moira Marquis is founder of Prison Banned Books Week and Clinical Assistant Professor of Writing and Applied Humanities at New York University. She has worked with prison book programs for twenty years and co-edited the first book detailing the decades long work of prison book programs, Books Through Bars (University of Georgia Press 2024). Her book on the history of prison censorship in America, Thought Threats, will be published in October 2027 with UNC Press. She has a PhD in English from UNC Chapel Hill.

Dana Blanchard is a Programming Director at Haymarket Books and manages the Books Not Bars program that sends free Haymarket Book titles to imprisoned people throughout the world. She is also one of the organizers of the Bridging the Gap Conference: The Power of Storytelling that will takes place for the second year in Chicago in May 2027.