Announcement
IOWP was suspended in 2020 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mission
IOWP works to build solidarity in our community through critical education and transformative writing.
What We Do
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We offer weekly writing and arts workshops in the Santa Cruz County Maximum Security Jail.
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We seek to create a community of writers from the inside and outside as a venue for healing, solidarity, artistic expression, and development of voice, confidence, and literary and writing acumen.
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In workshops, we affirm the agency, creative voice, humanity, and essential dignity of people who are undergoing the dehumanizing experience of incarceration.
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We are building and traversing a bridge that spans to the jail, from the local college, community, and university, and back again. We attempt to establish meaningful relationships that break down the false ‘us versus them’ mentality that characterizes dominant thinking of who prisoners are.
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We provide critical education in the community by creating public awareness about the damaging effects of mass incarceration and what can be done to eliminate injust, unwise, and inhumane policies.
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We produce a zine of IOWP writers' pieces to assist us in this work, and to reciprocate workshop participants for the gift of sharing writing and learning with us.
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We form community partnerships to mobilize and organize to build alternatives to incarceration, when the organization has the staffing capacity to do so.
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We are profoundly committed to an intersectional politics of leadership, and critical awareness of difference and privilege, in our our work both inside and out.
out of birdcage by Blue Berry Mouse Yumi