Books Through Bars presents Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons
A reading and discussion with author Megan Sweeney
Tuesday, June 29, 7:30 pm at Freebird Books
Find out more about Reading is My Window after the jump.
Drawing on extensive individual interviews and group discussions with ninety-four women imprisoned in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (UNC Press, 2010) explores how women prisoners use the limited reading materials available to them to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures. The book offers the first analysis of incarcerated women’s reading practices, and it foregrounds the voices and experiences of African American women, one of the fastest growing yet least acknowledged populations in U.S. prisons.
Reading Is My Window situates contemporary prisoners’ reading practices in relation to the history of reading and education in U.S. penal contexts, explores the material dimensions of women’s reading practices, and analyzes the modes of reading that women adopt when engaging with three highly popular genres: narratives of victimization, African American crime fiction, and self-help and inspirational books.
“Finally, I got a chance to say how I feel about a book to somebody that was willing to listen, somebody that understood, somebody else that saw some of the things I did. I got excited about every book I read because it was like a me inside of me getting a chance to come out, and it would just live! It was like getting a chance to see home and to see my childhood and to talk about it when somebody else was talking about it, too. It’s like it stirred up something in me and it would just come out like, ‘I gotta say this…I know this!’” –Denise, incarcerated at the Northeast Pre-Release Center
Books Through Bars–NYC is an all-volunteer group that sends free books and other reading material to people imprisoned nationwide.
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