Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing

By Helen Prejean

A PEN American Center Prize Anthology featuring a quarter century of prison inmates’ prose and verse—with a foreword by Sister Helen Prejean.
 
For more than three decades, the prestigious writers’ organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. Bell Chevigny, a former prison teacher, has selected the best of these submissions from twenty-five years to create Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing—a vital work, demonstrating that prison writing is a vibrant part of American literature.
 
The fifty-one original prisoners contributing to this volume deliver surprising tales, lyrics, and dispatches from an alien world covering the life span of imprisonment, from terrifying initiations to poignant friendships, from confrontations with family to death row, and sometimes share extraordinary breakthroughs. With nearly 2.2 million men and women—roughly the population of Houston—in American jails and prisons, we must listen to “this small country of throwaway people,” in Prejean’s words. Doing Time frees them from their sentence of silence. We owe it to ourselves to listen to their voices.
 
“There is a groping authenticity of language in Doing Time that encourages us to think again about prison life.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“The collection’s prose is honed and direct, with many contributors striking a hypnotic balance between the urgency inherent in writing as survival and the punishingly absurd nature of their circumstances: though their literary imaginations range widely, bodily, they’re going no place.” —Kirkus Reviews
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781628722185

Helen Prejean

Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ is a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph and author of the bestselling book Dead Man Walking.

Reviews for Doing Time

[edith1_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an anthology of prison writing submitted to a writing competition for inmates over the course of 25 years. All sorts of stuff: poetry, short stories, short memoirs. There were a few stories that were worth reading and thought provoking, but not all of it was.