Poetry Foundation presents:
Forms & Features with Tara Betts: A Wall Can Be Broken Down—Writing & Incarceration

All are welcome to a discussion and creative writing workshop led by Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue, based on some of the poems and forms considered by her students at Stateville Prison.

In this workshop, we’ll consider poems by Nazim Hikmet, Eve Ewing, Etheridge Knight, Claudia Rankine and others. Some of the points that we’ll consider will be finding affirmation in difficult places and asserting them with concrete detail, describing microaggressions in poems, how metaphors are paired with advice, and harvesting metaphors. To register, please email info@compoundyellow.com.
Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

After the workshop all are invited to visit the gallery exhibition downstairs of Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project: The Long Term

Between 2016-2018, artists, writers and members of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project created a series of thematic works around long-term sentencing policies and the other long terms they produce: long-term struggles for freedom, long-term loss in communities, and long-term relationships behind the prison wall. These projects emerged out of classes and collaborative work at Stateville prison, where people are serving extraordinarily long prison terms (60, 70 and 80 years), often for crimes for which they would have already been released, had they been sentenced 30 years earlier, or in a different country.

The Long Term exhibition is travelling around Chicago to create discussion about life and long term sentencing, with the voices of incarcerated artists and writers at the center. The exhibition includes: an 13 minute hand-drawn animation and a series of works on paper made by artists at Stateville prison; a series of video interviews with people impacted by long term sentencing; an audio installation with formerly incarcerated people about carceral policy; and a portfolio of risographic prints made by 15 Chicago artists that accompanies a book titled The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom. The works in this exhibition examines the impacts of life and long sentences and demands an end to death by incarceration.

Curated by Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project

Compound Yellow
244 Lake Street
Oak Park, Illinois
Free Admission
RSVP Required

Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue (Willow Books, 2009) and the chapbook THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali (Winged City Chapbook Press, 2013).

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