Writers across industries continue to raise concerns about pay equity, labor rights, and funding transparency. Movements like #PublishingPaidMe and the high-profile Writers Guild of America strike in 2023 showed how much writers must hustle to earn a living wage.

As a solution, New York state, San Francisco, and St. Paul, Minnesota, piloted guaranteed income programs offering randomly selected applicants monthly payments intended to help artists improve financial stability and mental well-being while developing their craft. The idea was simple: The best way to invest in quality arts and media and to promote equity is to pay artists a living wage.

But, until recently, programs promoting financial security for writers have not included some of the nation’s most vulnerable: those impacted by the U.S. carceral system. A new yearlong fellowship developed by Haymarket Books and funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Art for Justice Fund (A4J) aims to change that by supporting writers whose voices are often suppressed and censored.

Writing Freedom 

Launched in February, the inaugural Writing Freedom Fellowship cohort includes 20 writers, more than half of whom have been incarcerated.

“It’s a really unusual fellowship, a no-strings-attached fellowship with a fairly sizable monetary award,” said Haymarket Books Program Manager Jyothi Natarajan.

In the middle of 2022, Mellon and A4J approached Haymarket with an idea for a fellowship aimed at incarcerated writers. Once Natarajan joined the team, she worked with Mellon and A4J to put together the advisory board and build out details of the program. By May 2023, the team officially announced the fellowship and started the anonymous nomination process. The finalized cohort started their fellowship year in February 2024.

Each of the writers chosen for the fellowship will explore topics both directly and indirectly related to incarceration. Some of the writers hold bachelor’s degrees, master of fine arts degrees, and Ph.D.s. Others honed their craft through workshops and courses taught in prisons. Many of the writers have been published in major news outlets, literary journals, and commercial and independent presses. Some have received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Tin House, and the NAACP. However, just as many writers had no credits to their names.

The fellowship’s team, including Natarajan and an eight-person advisory board of authors, activists, and formerly incarcerated individuals, kept the fellowship requirements broad and straightforward to yield a diverse group of writers.

“What we wanted to see was a cohort made of folks who were at different points within their writing lives,” Natarajan said. “And maybe, through that journey, they have different things they may be able to share.”

Candidates for the fellowship must identify with being impacted by the carceral system, and their work must focus on fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Advisory board members, including Black feminist abolitionist Romarilyn Ralston, assembled an anonymous nomination committee to select writers from their networks. Ralston said she pulled nominators from communities she’s worked with, including the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Project Rebound, which supports formerly incarcerated people pursuing higher education.

The fellowship cohort also illustrates the variety of social justice writing communities that have developed over the last few decades. Fellows C. Fausto Cabrera and Zeke Caligiuri created the Stillwater Writers Collective in partnership with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, a program where many students go on to publish widely. Mexican poet, memoirist, and translator Marcelo Hernandez Castillo co-founded the Undocupoets collective, which supports undocumented writers. And Stevie Wilson founded the inside abolitionist study collective 9971 and the abolitionist journal In The Belly.

Natarajan said that the advisory council also wanted to ensure that nonfiction included journalism, given the wealth of investigative and long-form reporting in prisons. Almost a quarter of the writers in the fellowship identify as prison journalists or report on incarceration, including Ahmed Naji, an Egyptian author and journalist who was sentenced to two years in prison in 2016 for “violating public modesty” in Egypt by writing “sexually explicit” scenes in a magazine.

However, fellows are not restricted to writing about the carceral system. In their work, Hernandez Castillo and Victoria Newton Ford explore issues such as immigration and the child welfare system. O. Henry Prize-winning Crystal Wilkinson writes about Black Appalachia and the rural South. Her most recent book, “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks,” combines memoir with a cookbook.

Caligiuri said the variety of fellows’ experiences related to incarceration is one of the program’s strengths.

“We’re certainly not a static community,” Caligiuri said. “[The community] is changing; it’s dynamic. We’re not a monolith.” Prison journalist and critic John J. Lennon echoed these sentiments, noting that the fellowship validates that prison writing can span beyond the work of Jack Henry Abbott, who wrote “In the Belly of the Beast,” a compilation of letters about life in prison that was published in 1981.

Members of the fellowship team told Prism that they hope to combat the many isolating effects of the carceral system by bringing writers from different communities and experiences together. Writers are encouraged to remain in contact, for example, and build relationships as a cohort—especially with those currently incarcerated or in solitary confinement.

In semi-regular workshops, fellows share experiences, learn professional skills, and build networks. Fellow Starr Davis noted the importance of a session focused on contracts and the financial aspects of writing. According to Davis, the communication and support fellows have received make her feel confident that she can become a mentor to other system-impacted writers.

Compensating writers fairly and on time

The public nature of the new fellowship has meant that many of the writers’ work are now being pulled from siloed subcultures into the center. The monetary award also comes with many advantages—and some pressures.

According to Davis, the nature of the fellows’ work raises the stakes. The support the fellowship offers has led her to ruminate on a larger question: “How deep are you willing to commit because now, more than ever, we need social justice writers?” 

Fellows can use the prize money for costs directly associated with their writing—such as courses, editorial support, and administrative fees—or they can offset daily living expenses. Davis uses the money in part to offset child care and other living expenses as she finishes a book. Lennon intends to use the money to pay for a fact-checker for his forthcoming book, “The Tragedy of True Crime.”

Although Mellon and Haymarket keep the fellowship stipend a secret, many who work with incarcerated writers suspect the fellowship may be the first of its kind to offer a living wage.

Emily Nonko, co-director of Empowerment Avenue, an organization that works with incarcerated writers and advocates for their fair compensation, told Prism that the amount given to fellows shows that Mellon aims to invest in writers’ careers long-term.

According to Nonko, this model is not the norm. Often, awards and fellowships for incarcerated writers pay between $50 and $250. (The PEN America Prison Writing Contest awards’ top prize, for example, is $250.) In recent months, advocates have demanded that incarcerated writers get paid a living wage, on time, and in a just manner.

As Prism previously reported, formerly and currently incarcerated writers say PEN fails to pay prize winnings promptly, if at all, and that serious structural issues plague the organization’s fellowship programs.

Nonko acknowledges the difficulty of paying incarcerated writers, given the many barriers the criminal legal system imposes. However, she said, this is only more reason for organizations to have the right infrastructure to compensate writers fairly and on time. Without the proper precautions in place, states can target incarcerated writers for their work.

When incarcerated writer Curtis Dawkins received $150,000 in 2018 for his debut collection of short stories sold to Scribner, officials in the state of Michigan demanded 90% of his assets, including this book advance, to cover the cost of his incarceration. Multiple states have laws on the books that enable them to charge incarcerated people fees to recoup the costs associated with their incarceration.

According to Natarajan, the Writing Freedom team is committed to paying writers on time and in whatever format writers choose. Haymarket also works with legal experts and fellows individually to develop and execute plans for their awards.

For advocates, it’s promising that programming is being developed that prioritizes system-impacted writers while also paying them a living wage and preparing them for actual careers. Natarajan said this kind of financial and material support is necessary to have any chance in a notoriously competitive and cutthroat industry.

“As long as we have prisons, we have to tell these stories,” Ralston said. “And so, yes, we want to nurture writers and empower writers to tell their stories.”