“Michael said after the workshop that he never would have imagined he’d be a writer. When he reads his work to his peers it is freeing.”
–from SC prison holds writing program for prison inmates by Lyn Riddle
Perry Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in South Carolina, is host of a creative writing program for inmates. The “Writers Block” program was started by Carol Young Gallagher and Anna Katherine Freeland and functions as a traditional writing workshop where peer critique of work is emphasized.
Three years ago, Gallagher, then president of The Emrys Foundation, began the program after receiving a letter from an inmate asking to start a program. Emrys Foundation, a literary nonprofit which includes an annual journal and press, had previously held writing workshops in hospitals but never prisons. Gallagher, with the help of Freeland who “wanted to do a creative writing program in a prison since she was an undergraduate in the English and creative writing program at Converse College 16 years ago” created Writers Block, which they hope to one day make its own nonprofit and expand to other facilities.
To mark the program’s three-year anniversary, a journal of the inmate’s work will be published this fall.
Read more about the program in The Charlotte Observer.
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