“We Have These Beautiful Dreams”

A few years ago, poet and author Kaveh Akbar mailed a printed script of the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to a loved one incarcerated in a facility that didn’t allow physical books. Only later did he learn that prison guards had removed every other page from the script before it arrived. 

So when his debut novel Martyr! appeared on the shortlist for this year’s Inside Literary Prize, the national book award judged entirely by incarcerated readers, Akbar understood it to be an immense privilege. Having experienced firsthand the arbitrary censorship of correctional facilities, he was moved to see that his words had opened a portal between inside and outside communities. “The act of reading insists upon the irrepressibility of the imagination,” Akbar shares. “That I got to spend any time in [the judges’] consciousness, that my book can be a place one might go for six or ten or twelve hours, is an occasion for profound gratitude.”

The prize was inspired in part by France’s Prix Goncourt des Détenus, a prize modeled on the prestigious Prix Goncourt and judged by incarcerated readers. In December 2023—and in collaboration with the Center for Justice Innovation, the National Book Foundation, and Lori Feathers, co-owner of Interabang Books—Freedom Reads decided to establish a similar prize in the United States. The initiative grew naturally out of Freedom Reads’s work bringing libraries to prisons across the country: alongside expanding access to literature, the organization wanted to create a platform for incarcerated readers to share their opinions and participate in the broader literary conversation. “Incarcerated individuals are some of the most prolific readers around,” shares Ryan Lidberg, who is incarcerated at Minnesota Correctional Facility (MCF) in Rush City and served as a judge this year. “We read extensively and we read with purpose.” 

The process kicks off with a preliminary selection committee made up of incarcerated readers, prison librarians, attorneys, and organizational staff. The committee reads novels written by the finalists for the National Book Awards from two years earlier, then selects five finalists for the Inside Literary Prize. This year, alongside Akbar’s debut, the shortlist is comprised of Linnea Axelsson’s Aednan, translated by Saskia Vogel; Miranda July’s All Fours; Hisham Matar’s My Friends; and Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain.

Freedom Reads staff then distributes the shortlisted books to more than 300 judges at 12 correctional facilities across 6 states. As part of a national tour, writers and other literary figures visit participating facilities to lead readings and discussions and take part in voting sessions with the incarcerated judges. The result is something that bridges the worlds of publishing and organizing: a container that brings the creative and sociopolitical insights of our incarcerated comrades into the broader literary conversation—and, on September 3, 2026, into the second floor halls of New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, overlooking Bryant Park. 

We gathered there to celebrate the authors and judges behind this year’s prize. Among them is Bothayna Al-Essa, this year’s winner. The Kuwaiti writer and bookstore owner now joins a lineage that includes Imani Perry, who won the inaugural prize in 2024 for South to America, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, who won the 2025 prize for Chain-Gang All Stars. “It is the biggest honor that I think I’ve ever received,” Adjei-Brenyah reflects over the phone. It is a sentiment that he shares, in some form or another, with each other winner of the prize. 

Al-Essa’s winning novel, The Book Censor’s Library, depicts a world not far removed from that of carceral institutions: a world where the government censors most books and sterilizes those that remain. When a man who serves as a “book censor” discovers the unparalleled joy of reading, he is drawn into an underground resistance movement that nurtures imagination in the face of oppression. 

Midway through the novel, as the protagonist unearths alternative communities and perspectives, he asks himself: “What made one book deserve to be saved over another? Who decided its worth?” The question is reminiscent of a criminal legal system marked by arbitrary cruelties and structural callousness, but it also reflects the interrogative beginnings required to build something anew. “My novel, in its essence, is an attempt to legitimize our right to imagine a different world,” Al-Essa said in her acceptance speech, “and an attempt to defend our right to transform.” 

Here, the prize’s subject and process begin to mirror one another: the possibilities contained within these novels’ pages are reflected in Freedom Reads’s methods of reaching readers inside prisons. “It was my first time actually being heard from someone who wasn’t my family,” says Dyshawn Brown, a judge at Shawnee Correctional Center in Johnson County, Illinois. “When you’re in a courtroom . . . my judge, she didn’t really look at me, the prosecutor would look past me. [I] came from that . . . [to] a situation where not only am I looked at, not only am I recognized, but my opinion is wanted and given meaning.”

Like Dyshawn, Love Hodge reflected on how the Inside Literary Prize restored her sense of dignity and validated her creative input. “My intellect wasn’t diminished,” said Hodge, a former judge and current Princeton fellow, on the NYPL stage. “Thank you for sparking my joy back.” She went on to share how reading, ranking, and discussing the novels gave her an opportunity to connect differently with the more than sixty women in her unit—and with herself. Of A Woman’s Madness, the 2024 shortlisted title by Surinamese-Dutch author Astrid Roemer, she said, “that novel gave language to what I was dealing with.” In an environment that seeks to weaponize language and diminish dignity, the Inside Literary Prize promises something different. 

This year, the prize brought Miranda July’s All Fours to a circle of men at Shawnee Correctional Center in Illinois, challenging their assumptions around women’s midlife crises and menopause. The same novel helped Tina Alvarez, a judge in Washington State, “understand some of the things I may be going through at some point,” while Reggie Harper, another judge at MCF Rush City, related to the protagonist’s experience of realizing she had to rebuild herself entirely. 

If All Fours served as a mirror, Hisham Matar’s My Friends was akin to a warning for Talon Finn, a Washington-based judge who said the novel showed him “just how much trauma can put someone in a fear state; it made me realize I don’t want to be that.” Linnea Axelsson’s Aednan, an epic recounting the struggles and resilience of Sweden’s indigenous community over a century, meanwhile, offered a meditation on what children inherit by way of their ancestors. And Martyr! prompted Ryan to consider what it means to be “living with purpose, dying fulfilled, and having a legacy that you’re proud of.” 

Taken together, the judges’ responses suggest how deeply these books engaged their readers’ own questions about identity, inheritance, trauma, and purpose. And in awarding The Book Censor’s Library the prize, the judges affirmed the importance of resisting brutality and naming suppression when they encounter it. The Book Censor’s Library “touches on this contemporary issue of government censorship,” Michael C., a judge in Minnesota, observes. “Right now, the government is trying to modify history, they’re taking bits of history and rewriting it or erasing it entirely.” 

Reflecting on his experience reading The Book Censor’s Library, Talon evokes the image of the protagonist’s child. She had, he says, “this wonderful imagination and [was] this beautiful being as a person, and [yet the government] is stifling it to have this control. It’s very relatable in prison. We have these beautiful dreams and . . . get told, ‘You can’t have that because you’re a prisoner.’” 

The room of readers and writers—including those joining remotely from various prisons—walked away with many mandates. Among them was a responsibility to our fellow incarcerated comrades: to reach them as readers and, moreover, to make literary, political, and communal decisions that dismantle our separation and bring people home. We have a responsibility to allow their voices to penetrate library hallways and award rooms, movie theaters, and legislative sessions. And, as Al-Essa told me after her win, “above all, [we have an] ethical responsibility, as writers, toward people serving prison sentences to listen.”

^{Image Source: Arthur Radclyffe Dugmore, Bird Homes (1900), Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/13270039}

Contributors

Abigail Glasgow Abigail Glasgow is a writer and abolitionist based in Brooklyn, primarily covering the intersection of the criminal legal system and the arts, design, and culture.

Topics

• Culture & Politics

Tags

• #FreeTheBooks
• censorship
• first amendment