29/08/2021
Through the Center for Changing Systems of Power at Stony Brook University, Professor Robert T. Chase and Professor Zebulon Miletsky are partnering with incarcerated author, philanthropist and founder of the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation (UBFSF), Ivan Kilgore to produce, publish, and make publicly available the writings of incarcerated authors from around the nation as part of the 100 Prisoners' Book Publishing Literacy Program.
The aim of the project is to give incarcerated people the opportunity to reach beyond the walls of confinement to engage the mind and the wider public as published authors. "We believe that writing offers a path towards self fulfillment, intellectual and personal growth, self-reflection, and indeed empowerment. We're excited to bring this project to the wider public as the voice of incarcerated people is one that wider society needs to hear," said Professor Chase.
Chase, a historian of mass incarceration, the carceral state, and prisoners' rights and radicalism, has published two books on this subject, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners in Postwar America (UNC, 2020) and Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (UNC, 2019).
"I think it's even more exciting that these authors are taking control of the narrative as to who they are as incarcerated citizens. Far too often we've seen in society that this narrative has been one-sided and shaped for political gain by far too many unscrupulous politicians and beneficiaries of the police state, " said Professor Miletsky.
Miletsky is a historian of Northern Civil Rights Movements. His book "Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Movement" (UNC, 2021) will be published in December of this year. He has been active in grassroots movements for social justice in Brooklyn, New York and has helped in creating a curriculum for prison education based on the life of Malcolm X, currently being used in Omaha, Nebraska.
Sponsored by the UBFSF and the Center for Changing Systems of Power, members of the Sacramento IWOC and student volunteers at the University of Santa Cruz worked closely with the UBFSF to place a call for manuscript submissions of all genres and social justice essays. "The response was amazing. We received over 100 essays and have selected some 25 manuscripts to publish for our first round of publications under Zo Media Productions," said Ivan in a telephone interview for this article.
Zo Media Productions is a multi-media, publishing/production subsidiary operating under UBFSF's nonprofit charter to specifically collect and edit, publish and produce, promote, and disseminate and distribute to the public for educational purposes: essays, poetry, written articles, books, pamphlets, written songs and sheet music, works visual art including, but not limited to, dramatic works, paintings, and hand drawn images, which deal with, comment upon or expound some aspect of social, political, and/or economic condition within underserved communities.
To learn more about this project or to obtain our submission guidelines, contact us at:
United Black Family Scholarship Foundation
Attn: Zo Media Productions
P.O. Box 862
Bristow, OK 74010
Email: [email protected]
