MPWW’s Annual Fall Fundraiser
Fourteen years ago, on the last day of one of MPWW’s very first classes, a student pulled his instructor aside to give her an assignment. "Keep coming back,” he told her.
That assignment has been a guiding principle of our work ever since. In prison, people are used to organizations drifting away. One of the commitments that we’ve always made to our students is that we’ll keep coming back. If they want to continue their artistic practice, our students know that they can count on us to be there supporting them.
It’s our strong network of individual supporters that allows us to keep coming back, year after year. We need to raise $50,000 by Nov. 20th to sustain and expand our vital work in Minnesota prisons next year. Can you help us reach that goal with a donation of any amount?
Donate here. Thank you so much for your support.
Mission
Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW) fosters literary community and a devotion to art inside Minnesota correctional facilities through high-quality creative writing classes and related programming. During incarceration and throughout reentry, we empower writers, challenge stereotypes about the incarcerated population, and promote a vision of rehabilitation and restorative justice through art. We also seek to bridge the divide between literary communities inside and outside of prison by creating platforms for our students’ work.
History
MPWW was founded in 2011 with a single creative writing class at Lino Lakes Prison. Since then, we’ve grown into an organization of over 25 instructors who have taught more than 250 creative writing classes to over 3,000 men and women in every adult state prison in Minnesota. We are now the largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization in the country. Learn more about our classes and other programs here.