Prison Poetry 'Zine Project

“I started the Prison Poetry ‘Zine Project with RCAH students in incremental steps, from working with formerly incarcerated adults at Peckham Industries in Lansing, facilitating weekly creative workshops for detained youth at the Ingham County Youth Center, to collaborations with MDOC staff at four correctional facilities in the mid-Michigan region, to design and offer semester long programs, including yoga classes, for incarcerated adults.

My experiences in life, growing up in the shadow of Cook County Jail in Chicago, and witnessing the devastating impact of mass incarceration, scarcity of resources, poverty, discrimination, and the resulting violence in communities, all this, including my experiences in communities outside the bubble of the university, led me to prioritize this work in my teaching artist practice.

The RCAH students and I work with detained youth and incarcerated adults who have little or no access to learning opportunities, especially creative classes. In our work, we experience first-hand the positive outcomes of our collaborations with incarcerated communities, the safe spaces we create to tell our stories through the arts allows us to practice and live a shared vision for a better life for ourselves and the world. When we practice the arts together, we create sparks that ignite hope in us, and we need hope to flourish and to build bridges that allows us create stronger and more vibrant communities, where everyone has opportunities to shine bright and to imagine a world without prisons.

We are working on building relationships with new prison staff—to rebuild our programs because the pandemic has caused personal changes across our network. Currently, we are working the Ingham County Youth Center (ICYC), in collaboration the Lansing School District, to bring back arts programming to detained youth after the long hiatus caused by the pandemic. For the first time since the pandemic started, RCAH students and I were allowed to return and facilitate creative workshops at a Michigan Department of Corrections facility in the fall of 2022. We are planning to facilitate another seven-week poetry 'zine class in the spring of 2023 at the same facility and prison poetry slam in late April.”

-Guillermo Delgado