Takes the reader inside the walls of a medium-security prison and offers a glimpse at how music and the arts are offering second chances to the incarcerated. In a place often defined by trauma and control, a performing chorus composed of inmates and volunteers creates a community where healing, atonement and growth can occur.

The U.S. incarceration machine imprisons more people than in any other country. Music-Making in U.S. Prisons looks at the role music-making can play in achieving goals of accountability and healing that challenge the widespread assumption that prisons and punishment keep societies safe. The book’s synthesis of historical research, contemporary practices, and pedagogies of music-making inside prisons reveals that, prior to the 1970s tough-on-crime era, choirs, instrumental ensembles, and radio shows bridged lives inside and outside prisons. Mass incarceration had a significant negative impact on music programs. Despite this setback, current programs testify to the potency of music education to support personal and social growth for people experiencing incarceration and deepen social awareness of the humanity found behind prison walls. Cohen and Duncan argue that music-making creates opportunities to humanize the complexity of crime, sustain meaningful relationships between incarcerated individuals and their families, and build social awareness of the prison industrial complex. The authors combine scholarship and personal experience to guide music educators, music aficionados, and social activists to create restorative social practices through music-making.

Sidelined and derailed. That’s how Suzanne Kelsey felt three decades ago after her husband of fourteen years announced his decision to become a Methodist minister. They were thirty-four and had two young sons. An independent free-thinker who believes in a divine something-or-other but not organized religion, Kelsey values her privacy and likes to settle in and nest. She felt her husband was choosing an itinerant, public life of commitment to doctrine for both of them. Kelsey wanted no part of that strange world. In Skipping Church: Notes from an Accidental Minister’s Wife, Kelsey explores what callings are and who gets to claim them, whether a life right for one is right for two, how to live authentically despite pressures to be different, how nature and art can ground us spiritually even if we’re not religious, and where home is for those who move frequently. These musings, laced with humor and infused with honesty, are accompanied by scenes from Kelsey’s life as she gradually made peace with her husband’s career decision while forging her own path.

"Raising the Living Dead is a new history of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system in the middle decades of the twentieth century that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. The main idea of the book is that, in the region, multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and imperfectly enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation. Specifically, Alberto Ortiz Díaz argues that scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the "living dead" (an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners). These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also their mental health counterparts (psychologists and psychiatrists), social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz is able to tell a story that goes beyond structural and social control debates. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography and few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons"--

"A compassionate and imaginative retelling of a harrowing period in American penal history." Andy Douglas, Author of Redemption Songs: A Year in the Life of a Community Choir Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola's History explores, through poetry in the voices of those who took part, the String Heel Incident of the 1950s, when 31 inmates crippled themselves by slicing through their Achilles tendons in protest of the horrifying conditions at Angola Prison. The history of The Louisiana State Penitentiary, called Angola, is filled with atrocities, abuses, horror stories. This particular incident was coordinated by the prisoners themselves to bring attention to their treatment, and story of the Heel String Incident spread throughout the U.S., finally calling attention to the horrible conditions and the needs for reform. Poet Carol Tyx was named the inaugural winner of The Willow Run Poetry Book Award of Hidden River Arts for this stunning work. Read the praise for Remaking Achilles: "Remaking Achilles brings alive the vivid realities of Angola's history. I study Angola, ...this collection paints the horrors and injustices of time past in a way that the simple facts never do. Carol Tyx has done a remarkable job of reminding us all of where we came from and why we do not want to return." (Marianne Fisher-Giorlando, retired criminal justice professor and Angola historian) "These sterling voices pretending to be persona poems are so well researched and authentically rendered that the painful and traumatic memories of Angola will continue to haunt readers long after the last pages are sliced open and left bleeding." (Frank X Walker, author of The Unghosting of Medgar Evers) "A compassionate and imaginative retelling of a harrowing period in American penal history. With each vivid and lyrical insight, Carol Tyx weaves a compelling poetic tale depicting the effects of institutional racism and cruelty, of unimaginable hardship, but also of the human impulse to resist and seek dignity. In the darkest hours, there are sparks of light." (Andy Douglas, author of Redemption Songs: A Year in the Life of a Community Prison Choir) Like the ghostly inmate who takes his place in the long line of U.S. prison atrocities, Carol Tyx claims her place in a long tradition of poets like Muriel Rukeyser (The Book of the Dead, 1938) and Carolyn Forché (The Angel of History, 1994), incorporating individual impersonations and historical documents into lines that incriminate us all. (Cecile Goding, The Iowa Summer Writing Festival) As calls for reform of the systems of punishment and incarceration grow, Carol Tyx's work will take its place among those calls, bringing the voices of the victims themselves into the chorus.