In the spring and summer of 2022, with a grant from New York State Council on the Arts and the support of the creative aging experts at Lifetime Arts Inc, Adirondack Center for Writing (ACW) created a writing workshop program at Adirondack Correctional Facility, a state prison located in Ray Brook, Essex County, NY, populated mostly by older adults.
After the completion of the sixteen weeks of classes, instructor Tyler Barton invited students to submit their favorite original poems, essays, and stories for a class anthology. I’m Telling You Now, Wherever You Are: An Adirondack Correctional Facility Anthology of Writing is the resulting 75-page book, which will be released this week with a private launch reading at the prison.
Copies are available to pick up from ACW (15 Broadway, in Saranac Lake, NY). A press release from ACW said “This anthology is a testament to the idea that a person’s story does not end when they become incarcerated, nor does that person’s past cease to speak.”
The anthology includes work by everyone who participated in the workshops. It was edited, laid-out, and designed by Tyler Barton, who also led the weekly workshops at Adirondack Correctional Facility. Barton has been working with older adults through writing workshops for five years in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and now in the North Country.
ACW has been leading writing workshop at North Country prisons for over two decades. Their program at FCI Ray Brook is one of the country’s longest-running prison writing programs.
More information about the project, click here.
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