Free Books

About 200 letters arrive at the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP) every week from people in confinement who are looking for something to read. The requests cover the spectrum: sci-fi, westerns, poetry, manga, astronomy, LGBTQ+ literature, books by Black writers, books on how to draw or learn music or start a business, books on Indigenous histories, dictionaries, books in Spanish, puzzle books. One person only wanted books on West Virginia. Another wrote, “I’ll read anything you send to me.” In response to these requests, APBP has mailed more than 70,000 free books to people imprisoned in six states: West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.

Since 2004 APBP has grown from a few dedicated students into a regional leader in the movement for educational justice. In addition to mailing books, APBP creates book clubs in prisons, pays tuition costs for students taking West Virginia University (WVU) courses in prison, and awards scholarships to released people enrolled in a college or university in our state. APBP also engages the public in conversations about the prison–industrial complex and transformative justice. Our dream is not more books in confinement but an end to torture, not more programs in prisons and jails but an end to mass incarceration and perpetual punishment.

People write to APBP for many reasons. When I’m asked what people in prison want to read, I think of a woman in Tennessee hoping for the sky, C. S. Mars longing to know everything, someone sliding Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets to a teenager in a cell—and Reginald Dwayne Betts opening the first page. I think of how often we don’t know what we want to read until we are reading it.

Some letters ask for information on health, the law, or life after release. Other people are writing on behalf of someone else who wants to learn to read. Horace Nunley thanked us for books that help prepare for what is “in store for us once we’re back. . . . I educate myself with the political and historical books you send me. Knowledge will free me and help me to never return to a cell.”

Letter writers affirm reading’s path to personal growth, to knowledge and freedom, variations on Frederick Douglass’s complex account of literacy. In a well-known passage in his autobiography, Malcolm X wrote that he never felt more free than when he began to read behind bars: “I knew right there in prison that reading had forever changed the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me a long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”

One letter writer, Hugh Williams, Jr., received a book from one of our volunteers, Emily—and hasn’t looked back. Like Malcolm X before him, Williams found books to be a path out of hopelessness. In the following essay, he reflects on the transformative power of reading over the course of his sentence.

—Katy Ryan
Founder, Appalachian Prison Book Project

There was once a time when the thought of spending months in a closet-sized room with no one to talk to would have terrified me, possibly even drove me crazy. But that was seventeen years ago.

I was arrested at seventeen and given a fifty-year sentence. Now I have spent seventeen years, half of my life, in prison, and once again, I find myself in solitary confinement. I am in my eighth month of solitary confinement, and I’ve only been out of my cell once in the last two-and-a-half months. Where once I would have been driven mad, now I find the peace, quiet, and solitude to be comforting. Sometimes I go weeks without speaking. With all the chaos and stress that can become one’s daily life in prison, solitude can be preferred over being involved with other people’s drama and problems.

My point is that life in prison can be traumatic and life-altering whether one is by oneself or around other people, and it can have negative side effects no matter who you are or where you are. Like an animal who suffers continuous abuse, we can find ourselves becoming withdrawn and antisocial and feeling as if we are alone in this world with no one to care whether we wake up in the morning. I’ve lived feeling like that, and it is the loneliest feeling. Never have I felt so alone and helpless, a creature in exile and lost with no friends or family to ease the pain and bitterness that grows wild in the uncultivated heart.

Fortunately, I was to receive a blessing that helped open my heart, enlighten my mind, and allow me to thrive, no matter where the winds would take me.

When I was locked away, I was a high school dropout. Yet, even before that, my education was stalled. I could only add and subtract when it came to math, and all I knew of science was the process of photosynthesis (and literally nothing else). Of history, I could only tell you the most basic facts that anyone familiar with U.S. culture could tell you, and I could only read at a third- or fourth-grade level. I couldn’t tell you what a noun, verb, or sentence was. Suddenly I found myself in chains, locked in a cage, and exiled from my home and all I held dear for a sentence of fifty years, a debt that I am still uncertain that I will ever live to see paid. Hope for me to grow was in short supply.

Every teacher I had ever known had given up on me when I was free. Who would teach me now that I was in chains?

Before my incarceration, I had never read a book that was more than fifteen or twenty pages. It never held my interest; in fact, I hated to read. I spent weeks in a cell in solitary confinement simply staring at the walls, growing more hopeless and depressed with each day. Indeed, I learned that the world still turned without me, and I was soon forgotten.

Growing up, I always saw my Aunt Teresa reading whenever she wasn’t working and had a moment to spare. I once asked her why she read so much, and she smiled at me as though she knew a great secret. She told me that by reading a book, if the story was good, it could take you to other worlds and teach you things you never thought were possible. I thought she’d gone insane. How could ink on paper create a world? Years later, locked in a tiny, cold room covered in graffiti, curse words, and racist slurs, I’d sit on a very thin mat on a steel bunk jutting out of a wall and, desperate (near suicide), I would learn the secret Aunt Teresa knew about books and reading. It would save my life.

I learned that reading not only takes you to other worlds, but when given good books and well-crafted stories, I could leave the cell that bound and limited my body and held me captive and alone. I gained new perspectives; I was given new friends—friends who did not abandon me or forget me. Together, we traveled places, sailed seas, fought wars. We sought redemption from our past and struggled to become better men, and, in time, we found forgiveness, and perhaps I found a place or two where even someone like me could be called a hero. And no one laughed when it was said.

For most people, this is a very big world that is wide and reaches farther than they can see, and that is good. Yet it is not so for me. Physically, I traverse my world in less than ten strides. Yet, with every book I have the honor to read, I leave this place, meet new people, learn new things, and in some way become a better man. I wanted to be like these good men and women who didn’t let mistakes or their past crimes stop them from seeking redemption or stop them from doing what is hard or right. Yes, to some these are just books, and on their pages are simply stories. But to the teenager who’d just turned eighteen when he stepped off a prison bus at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary (in 2005 before it was closed and made a tourist attraction), many of these books’ heroes and struggling characters influenced my still-developing mind. They provided me with an outlet to freedom, hope when I had no hope, and a role model to encourage me when I had no good role models. Having access to books literally saved my life.

With encouragement to do right and become better, books made me strive to earn my GED in 2007 and then take college courses. I began reading fiction, and as I read and became better at reading and writing, I wrote a book of poetry. Then I moved to nonfiction books on history and philosophy, then to books on psychology and on different religions, and even some books on the conditions of society and crime.

I was the one all my teachers gave up on, but ten years later I became a teacher. I taught GED classes, a class on career management, and a class on history. And it all began with a shivering boy, alone and crying in a cell, wanting to die when he was handed a book of fiction by John Sanford about a detective named Lucas Davenport. I still can’t believe the difference a book can make. There are endless possibilities.

And so, programs like the Appalachian Prison Book Project that work to give people in prison access to books are not only changing lives but saving lives—creating writers, teachers, lovers of literature and art—by simply giving a book with a kindly written letter (the first I received was personally signed “Emily”) that brings light to a dark place and shows someone that someone else does care and that the world is not so dark and we are not so alone.

Indeed, there are many worlds that await and many chains to be broken.

Adapted from This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project, edited by Connie Banta, Kristin DeVault-Juelfs, Destinee Harper, Katy Ryan, and Ellen Skirvin. Used with permission of West Virginia University Press © 2024.

_{Image source: Patrick Tomasso / Unsplash}

Contributors

Hugh Williams, Jr. Hugh Williams, Jr., is an author incarcerated in Tennessee, sentenced as a juvenile to a fifty-year prison term.

Topics

• Decarceral Pathways

Tags

• #FreeTheBooks
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors
• library services