Carolyn Baxter (born 1953) [1] is an African-American poet, playwright, and musician. [2] [3] [4] Baxter is from Harlem, New York. She was a participant in the Black Panthers School Breakfast Program. Baxter was formerly incarcerated at the New York City Correctional Institute for Women at Rikers Island. [5] Her writings are considered a part of the Prison Art's Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. [6] [7]
Baxter worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP and was a member of the Black Panthers Party. She also worked for the New York City Board of Education in programs for ex-offenders and adolescent offenders. [8]
Baxter was formerly incarcerated at the New York City Correctional Institute for Women at Rikers Island. [5] There, she joined the Free Space Writing Project. Her writings are considered a part of the Prison Art's Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. [6] [7] Baxter served time with the singer/poet Marilyn Buck. [9] Baxter attended BARD College after her incarceration. [10]
Brown University did an exhibit titled, Poetry in the Time of Mass Incarceration, which displayed Baxter's writings in the John Hay Library's Willis Reading Room at Brown from September 2015 – January 4, 2016. [11] Her work has been used in studies of the prison industrial complex. [12]
Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Miguel Piñero was a Puerto Rican born American playwright, actor and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. He was a leading member of the Nuyorican literary movement.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Marilyn Jean Buck was an American Marxist and feminist poet who was imprisoned for her participation in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur, the 1981 Brink's robbery and the 1983 U.S. Senate bombing. Buck received an 80-year sentence, which she served in federal prison, from where she published numerous articles and other texts. She was released on July 15, 2010, less than a month before her death at age 62 from cancer.
Feminist separatism is the theory that feminist opposition to patriarchy can be achieved through women's separation from men. Much of the theorizing is based in lesbian feminism.
The feminist school of criminology is a school of criminology developed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a reaction to the general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. It is the view of the feminist school of criminology that a majority of criminological theories were developed through studies on male subjects and focused on male criminality, and that criminologists often would "add women and stir" rather than develop separate theories on female criminality.
The feminist sex wars, also known as the lesbian sex wars, sex wars or porn wars, are collective debates amongst feminists regarding a number of issues broadly relating to sexuality and sexual activity. Differences of opinion on matters of sexuality deeply polarized the feminist movement, particularly leading feminist thinkers, in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continue to influence debate amongst feminists to this day.
Prison literature is a literary genre characterized by literature that is written while the author is confined in a location against his or her will, such as a prison, jail or house arrest. The writing can be about prison, informed by it, or simply coincidentally written while in prison. It could be a memoir, nonfiction, or fiction.
American prison literature is literature written by Americans who are incarcerated. It is a distinct literary phenomenon that is increasingly studied as such by academics.
New Narrative is a movement and theory of experimental writing launched in San Francisco in the late 1970s by writers and novelists Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. New Narrative strove to represent subjective experience honestly without pretense that a text can be absolutely objective nor its meaning absolutely fluid. Authenticity is paramount in New Narrative, and is possible with a variety of devices, including fragmentation, meta-text, identity politics, explicit descriptions of sex and undisguised identification with the author's physicality, intentionality, interior emotional life and external life circumstances. The New Narrative movement includes many gay, bisexual, queer and lesbian authors, and the works were greatly influenced by the AIDS epidemic in the '80s. In addition to founders Bruce Boone and Robert Glück, New Narrative writers include Steve Abbott, Kathy Acker, Michael Amnasan, Roberto Bedoya, Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Benderson, Charles Bernstein, Nayland Blake, Lawrence Braithwaite, Rebecca Brown, Mary Burger, Kathe Burkhart, Marsha Campbell, Dennis Cooper, Sam D'Allesandro, Gabrielle Daniels, Leslie Dick, Cecelia Dougherty, Bob Flanagan, Judy Grahn, Brad Gooch, Carla Harryman, Richard Hawkins, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Edith A. Jenkins, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, R. Zamora Linmark, Eileen Myles, John Norton, F.S. Rosa, Camille Roy, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, David O. Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Matias Viegener, Scott Watson, and Laurie Weeks.
A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where people are confined against their will and denied their liberty under the authority of the state, generally as punishment for various crimes. Authorities most commonly use prisons within a criminal-justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those who have pled or been found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment.
Beth E. Richie is a professor of African American Studies, Sociology, Gender and Women's Studies, and Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she currently serves as head of the Criminology, Law, and Justice Department. From 2010 to 2016, Richie served as the director of the UIC Institute of Research on Race and Public Policy. In 2014, she was named a senior adviser to the National Football League Players Association Commission on domestic violence and sexual assault. Of her most notable awards, Richie has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute, the Advocacy Award from the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Visionary Award from the Violence Intervention Project. Her work has been supported by multiple foundations including Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Institute for Justice, and the National Institute of Corrections.
The feminist pathways perspective is a feminist perspective of criminology which suggests victimization throughout the life course is a key risk factor for women's entry into offending.
Norma Stafford was an American poet. Born in Tennessee in 1932, she was the tenth of ten children. Stafford attended nursing school, but subsequently left when it was discovered she was lesbian. Stafford was arrested for various misdemeanors and spent five years in prison. While at the California Institution for Women, she began writing poetry and received education through the Santa Cruz Women's Prison Project. After being released from prison, Stafford continued to write poetry.
Feminist poetry is inspired by, promotes, or elaborates on feminist principles and ideas. It might be written with the conscious aim of expressing feminist principles, although sometimes it is identified as feminist by critics in a later era. Some writers are thought to express feminist ideas even if the writer was not an active member of the political movement during their era. Many feminist movements, however, have embraced poetry as a vehicle for communicating with public audiences through anthologies, poetry collections, and public readings.
Precious BedellMurray is an American woman who was imprisoned for twenty years for murdering her two-year-old daughter, Lashonda Bedell. She has since worked as an activist to improve the lives of those affected by incarceration.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Marilyn Salzman Webb, also known as Marilyn Webb, is an American author, activist, professor, feminist and journalist. She has been involved in the civil rights, feminist, anti-Vietman war and end-of-life care movements, and is considered one of the founders of the Second-wave women's liberation movement.
Bryonn Bain is an American poet, actor, prison activist, scholar, author, hip hop artist and professor of African American Studies and World Arts & Cultures in the School of the Arts and the School of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles.
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