Tacenda Literary Magazine is an annual literary magazine devoted to matters relating to crime, punishment, and social justice. The magazine is published by BleakHouse Publishing. Entries include original poems, stories, and plays. An effort is made to include work of current or former prisoners.

Poetry. THE MOST NATURAL THING is like a series of x-rays symmetrical square boxes made of language, in which language is describing the anatomy of one body, and this body becomes a container of information about science, myth, memory, history, and dream. Think about a community of trees all sharing one clump of tangled roots underground, a kind of heart though above ground they seem to be separate entities. The book looks at what is separate on the surface and tries throughout to find that tangled heart."

The short stories, poems, and photographs featured in the Spring 2011 edition of Tacenda Literary Magazine contribute another layer to our understanding of the multifaceted world of crime and punishment. By offering unique and contemplative insights into the justice system, the works featured here both educate and illuminate the public on the dark corners of our society that we ignore at our peril.

We live in an Islamophobic world, where Muslim people are constantly under attack, and must prove their innocence when they’ve not even committed a crime. We also live in a world of rigid gender roles and gender violence, where women, gender non-conforming and trans people are victims of violence, and have their gender expressions, freedoms, and desires policed. There’s pressure from both Muslims and non-Muslims to fit into severe stereotypes of Muslim identity and the ways in which it is acceptable to be Muslim. The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me is a celebration of intersectional identity that dispels the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim, particularly for women, gender non-conforming, and trans people. In holding space for multiple intersecting identities, the anthology celebrates and protects those identities.

Zek is the story of Jonny: a man broken off and doing time in an eastern Washington state prison. Zek lays bare the brutality of a life spent behind bars. It is naked. It is ugly. And it is beautiful.

"This is what we know, and we know it better than anyone else." —from the introduction by Vivian Nixon and Daryl V. Atkinson A thoughtful and surprising cornucopia of ideas for improving America's criminal justice system, from those most impacted by it When The New Press, the Center for American Progress, and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples and Family Movement issued a call for innovative reform ideas, over three hundred currently and formerly incarcerated individuals responded. What We Know collects two dozen of their best suggestions, each of which proposes a policy solution derived from their own lived experience. Ideas run the gamut: A man serving time in Indiana argues for a Prison Labor Standards Act, calling for us to reject prison slavery. A Nebraska man who served a federal prison term for white-collar crimes suggests offering courses in entrepreneurship as a way to break down barriers to employment for people returning from incarceration. A woman serving a life sentence in Georgia spells out a system of earned privileges that could increase safety and decrease stress inside prison. And a man serving a twenty-five-year term for a crime he committed at age fifteen advocates powerfully for eliminating existing financial incentives to charge youths as adults. With contributors including nationally known formerly incarcerated leaders in justice reform, twenty-three justice-involved individuals add a perspective that is too often left out of national reform conversations.

This book examines the history, theory and journalistic practice of profile writing. Profiles, and the practice of writing them, are of increasing interest to scholars of journalism because conflicts between the interviewer and the subject exemplify the changing nature of journalism itself. While the subject, often through the medium of their press representative, struggles to retain control of the interview space, the journalist seeks to subvert it. This interesting and multi-layered interaction, however, has rarely been subject to critical scrutiny, partly because profiles have traditionally been regarded as public relations exercises or as ‘soft’ journalism. However, chapters in this volume reveal not only that profiling has, historically, taken many different forms, but that the idea of the interview as a contested space has applications beyond the subject of celebrated individuals. The volume looks at the profile’s historical beginnings, at the contemporary manufacture of celebrity versus the ‘ordinary’, at profiling communities, countries and movements, at profiling the destitute, at sporting personalities and finally at profiling and trauma.