Housed within Haymarket Books, the Writing Freedom Fellowship aims to elevate the essential voices and contributions of writers impacted by the carceral system. About to enter its third year, the fellowship is awarded to 20 emerging and established poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers annually.

The 2024 Fellows Reading celebrates the inaugural cohort and features 16 writers along with a special message from novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner, who serves on the Writing Freedom advisory board. Read more about the 2024 Writing Freedom fellows at https://writing-freedom.org/fellows/2024 and follow their work.

***Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the live-streamed video on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and captioning will be provided.***

Speakers:

C Fausto Cabrera (he/him) is an Artist, Writer, and the Director of Transformative Justice at Damascus Way ReEntry & ReCovery Center. His poetry is published widely​. His art series, Inherited Scars​, was shown at the Weisman Art Museum ​and Cargill Gallery. ​He is a 2025 Common Justice Practitioner Lab Fellow.

Zeke Caligiuri (he/they) is a multi-genre writer and editor from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am, and his work has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration, Caligiuri is now helping to build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition, empowering system-impacted people and reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.

Starr Davis (she/her) is a poet, essayist, and dedicated mother from Columbus, Ohio, now based in Houston, Texas. Her work has been featured in various literary platforms, and she has been recognized as a fellow at The Luminary, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and PEN America. Davis’ memoir I Am Mostly Bad Blood (Autumn House Press) is forthcoming this fall.

Stefani Echeverría-Fenn (she/they) is a queer nonfiction writer based in Oakland, California. Her writing explores motherhood, class, madness, disability, housing justice, and queer familial lineages that transcend bio-reproductive kinship bonds. Echeverría-Fenn’s work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets, Sententiae Antiquae, Eidolon, Bellevue Literary Review, and the National Queer Arts Festival. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow.

Dee Deidre Farmer (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, consultant, and Director of Fight4Justice Project. She is a trailblazer in transgender and prison litigation, and the architect of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Farmer v. Brennan. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic she disseminated her poems and essays within the Bureau of Prisons. Today, Ms. Farmer continues her mission to restore effective representation in collateral proceedings and to expand successful reentry for incarcerated people.

Victoria Newton Ford is a poet and essayist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her writing explores fungibility, violence, haunting, spectacles, intimacy, (re)memory, and death. She has received support from Crosstown Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, TORCH Literary Arts, MacDowell, and more. Ford’s writing appears in Scalawag, Literary Hub, Sojourners, Jai-Alai Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first manuscript and documentary, which examine slavery as an ever-present haunting in the lives of Black mothers and their children.

Dr. Keeonna Harris (she/her) is a memoirist, creative nonfiction writer, and abolitionist scholar, born and raised in Watts and other parts of South Central Los Angeles. In her writing, she focuses on the health disparities and radical organizing for women connected to systems of mass incarceration. Harris’ memoir Mainline Mama (Amistad Press, 2025) explores motherhood, familial relationships, and well-being for Black women in the United States.

Kwaneta Harris (she/her) is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist and Movements Against Mass Incarceration Social Change Fellow. Harris is an abolition feminist and her stories expose how the intersection of gender, race, and place contribute to state-sanctioned, gender-based violence. She is currently working on a book about the teenagers from juvenile who were her neighbors in adult solitary confinement.

Kenneth Hartman (he/him) is an award-winning writer and prison reform activist. His book Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars (Atlas & Co., 2009) won the 2010 Eric Hoffer Award for memoir. After serving more than thirty-seven years in prison, Hartman was paroled in 2017 and remains free. He is deeply involved in transforming the prison system and assisting the recently paroled.

Quntos KunQuest (he/him) is an incarcerated novelist, artist, and songwriter from Shreveport, Louisiana. He is the author of This Life: A Novel (Agate, 2021), which was awarded a 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Debut Fiction category. Learn how to support KunQuest's campaign for exoneration here.

Ken Lamberton (he/him) writes about the nature of the Southwest. He is the author of Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations from Prison, which won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published hundreds of essays and six books, most recently Chasing Arizona. Lamberton leads a weekly workshop in Tucson for former prisoners and others from the community.

John J. Lennon (he/him) is a contributing editor at Esquire and the author of The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us (Celadon, 2025). His writing regularly appears in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, ​the Atlantic, and New York magazine, and his work has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing.

Ian Manuel (he/him) is the author of the memoir My Time Will Come (Pantheon, 2022). Through his poetry and creative nonfiction, Manuel explores growing up in prison and solitary confinement, where he spent eighteen years of his life from ages fifteen to thirty-three. Manuel lives in NYC where he works at The Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and travels the country giving presentations as an author for Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.

Ahmed Naji (he/him) is a bilingual writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and official criminal from Egypt. His novels are Rogers (2007), Using Life (2014), And Tigers to My Room (2020), Happy Endings (2023), and most recently, a memoir, Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison (McSweeney’s, 2023), which was a Finalist at the National Book Critics Circle. Presently he is exiled in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the editor most recently of Egypt + 100 from Comma Press.

Katie Schmid (she/they) is a poet, fiction writer, and creative nonfiction writer from Illinois. Her work explores female embodiment, motherhood, the effects of incarceration, and how the influences of capitalism and carceral justice affect the bodies and minds of the people living in the United States. Schmid is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and the author of the poetry collection Nowhere (University of New Mexico Press, 2021).

Crystal Wilkinson (she/her) is an award-winning author, and past Poet Laureate of Kentucky (2021-2023). Her books include Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, The Birds of Opulence, and Perfect Black. She has won an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction and edits Screen Door Press, publishing diverse fiction throughout the Black diaspora. Wilkinson’s memoir Heartsick is forthcoming from Crown.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels Creation Lake, The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; and a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction.

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This event is organized by Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.