Professor. Writer. Speaker. Prison Teacher.
Last Wednesday, in addition to rediscovering hope for our country and for democracy, much of the world discovered the power of the spoken word. Through the brilliant of Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman, we were able to be inspired by her words, as she recited “The Hill we Climb. ” For some, this might have been […]
Celebrating Poetry, From the Outside In Read More »
The pandemic has made the last year extremely difficult for all of us, but conditions in our prisons have gone from terrible to intolerable. Several Minnesota prisons have become hotspots of infection, and all programming and visitation has been halted. Many of the incarcerated have spent most of the last 10 months in their cell.
The Season of Small Gestures of Compassion Read More »
“Before I Was Anything” A Poem by Zeke Caligiuri Before I was anything I was an abstraction, sound waves moving through glycerin. Before the effigies of my generation in orange jumpsuits started tattooing cuffs on their wrists, bars on their hearts, I was a red jumpsuit running under evergreens on the
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We’ve all heard the saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names may never harm me.” Yet most of us have experienced the power of language to harm us. For one of my prison classes, I instructed the incarcerated students to write a personal essay of two to three typewritten or 3-4 handwritten
Sticks and Stones, Essays from Incarcerated Students Read More »
Eddie comes up to me after the midterm and says he too is afraid that he hadn’t done as well as he should have. Eddie is a tutor, a sweet and serious man in his late twenties, who works with other inmates to help them earn a GED. “You see, my grandma died this week,”
Saying Goodbye to Grandma in Chains Read More »
Tonight was the first night of a new class, one that I am teaching with John Schmit, an English Professor at Augsburg College. It’s a sociolinguistics class called Language and Power. On this first night it all came flooding back why teaching here seems so important, why it is both exhilarating and devastating, why I
Knowledge is Truly Food for our Souls Read More »