Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than 60 books. He is associated with the Black Mountain poets, although his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. Creeley was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lomax Hawes, also distinguished collectors of folk music.
Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville or Huntsville Unit (HV), nicknamed "Walls Unit", is a Texas state prison located in Huntsville, Texas, United States. The approximately 54.36-acre (22.00 ha) facility, near downtown Huntsville, is operated by the Correctional Institutions Division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The facility, the oldest Texas state prison, opened in 1849.
The Cummins Unit is an Arkansas Department of Corrections prison in unincorporated Lincoln County, Arkansas, United States, in the Arkansas Delta region. It is located along U.S. Route 65, near Grady, Gould, and Varner, 28 miles (45 km) south of Pine Bluff, and 60 miles (97 km) southeast of Little Rock.
Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer, who has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities that are usually hostile to outsiders.
Anne Tardos is a French-born American poet, visual artist, academic, and composer.
Tom Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer.
Regis Brodie (1942–2024) was a tenured professor of art at the Department of Art and Art History at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a potter. From 1972, he served as the Director of the Summer Six Art Program at Skidmore College. He also wrote a book called The Energy-Efficient Potter, which was published by Watson-Guptill Publications in 1982. He started the Brodie Company in 1999 in the interest of developing tools that would aid potters at the potter's wheel.
Paul C. Metcalf was an American writer. He wrote in verse and prose. Devoted admirers included Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds. His books include Will West (1956), Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), Apalache (1976), The Middle Passage (1976), Zip Odes (1979), and U.S. Dept. of the Interior (1980). He was the great-grandson of one of his major literary influences, Herman Melville.
Bobbie Louise Hawkins was a short story writer, monologist, and poet.
Brandon M. Stickney is an American journalist, author, and documentarian. He was a newspaper reporter at the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal from 1990 to 1995. He is the author of All-American Monster: The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh and The Amazing Seven Sutherland Sisters: A Biography of America's First Celebrity Models. Released in late 2020, Stickney's memoir is The Five People You'll Meet in Prison.
The Thomas Goree Unit (GR) is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice men's prison, located in Huntsville, Texas, 4 miles (6.4 km) south of downtown Huntsville on Texas State Highway 75 South. The Goree Unit is located within Region I. First opened in 1911, it served as the only women's correctional facility in Texas until 1982, after the women were moved to state prisons in Gatesville. For a period Goree held the state's sole female death row inmate, until her conviction was changed to a non-capital offense. There was more than one death row female at Goree in 1979.
Simone Muench is an American poet and a professor of creative writing and film studies. She was raised in the small town of Benson, Louisiana and also Arkansas. She completed her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Colorado in Boulder, received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is director of the Writing Program at Lewis University in Romeoville.
BlazeVOX Books, often stylized as BlazeVOX [books], is an independent publisher founded by Geoffrey Gatza and based in Buffalo, New York. Since 2000, it has published more than 350 books of poetry and prose, most of which fall within the sphere of avant-garde literature.
Terrell Don Hutto, was an American businessman and one of the three co-founders of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), whose establishment marked the beginning of the private prison industry during the era of former President Ronald Reagan. In 1983, Hutto, Robert Crants and Tom Beasley formed CCA and received investments from Jack C. Massey, the founder of Hospital Corporation of America, Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The T. Don Hutto Residential Center, one of CCA's detention centers, was named after him.
Geoffrey Lea Winningham is an American photographer, journalist, and filmmaker best known for his photographs and documentary films focusing on Texas and Mexican culture. Geoff's work was first recognized in the early 1970s when he published the book Friday Night in the Coliseum, featuring his photographs of professional wrestling and recorded conversations with wrestlers and fans. The book was followed in 1972 by a 16mm, black and white documentary film of the same title.
In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America is a 2012 book by Bruce Jackson and Diana Christian, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Damien Wayne Echols is an American author who first became known as one of three teenagers, the West Memphis Three, convicted of a triple murder in 1994 despite the lack of physical evidence connecting them to the crime and the dubious nature of the other evidence. Upon his release from death row in 2011 under an Alford plea, Echols authored several autobiographical and spiritual books. He has been featured in multiple books, documentaries, and podcasts about his spiritual works and the West Memphis Three case.
Richard Owens is an American poet. Known also for his work as a publisher and critic, he is founding editor of the literary journal Damn the Caesars and co-founder of the left-wing punk band Those Unknown. His poetic work appears in several volumes, including Delaware Memoranda (2008), No Class (2012), Ballads, and the collected volume Poems (2019). A number of his literary essays, most of which earlier appeared in scholarly and small press publications, are included in the collection Sauvage: Essays on Anglophone Poetry (2019).
Rayna Diane Green is an American curator and folklorist. She is Curator Emerita, in the Division of Cultural and Community Life at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
