About

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.

FAQ

What kind of classes does MPWW teach?

MPWW instructors teach a wide range of creative writing classes every year. Our course offerings are dynamic and ever-changing so our students receive variety and balance. We offer courses in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting and more. At many facilities, we offer beginning, intermediate, and advanced classes to cater to the varied needs and experience of our students.

Some of our courses are genre-focused (Introduction to Poetry, Flash Fiction, The Lyric Essay, etc.), but we often teach courses that are more topical and span multiple genres (Nature Writing, Point of View, etc.). We also occasionally teach classes centered on life experience (Restorative Justice, The Poetry of Addiction, etc.).

In general, our course offerings in any given year will look similar to that of a creative writing department at a large college or university.

Who are MPWW’s instructors?

MPWW has a robust pool of accomplished arts instructors. They’ve published novels, memoirs, and collections of essays, short stories, and poetry. Most teach concurrently at other institutions, such as Anoka-Ramsey Community College, Century College, Carleton College, Hamline University, Macalester College, and The Loft. All MPWW instructors are actively publishing and/or performing and share a reverence for the transformation that can happen at the confluence of art and education. Learn more about our instructors here.

Who are MPWW’s students?

MPWW serves a diverse group of writers and performers. They are poets, novelists, essayists, memoirists, spoken word artists, musicians, dramatists, journalists, and storytellers. They are readers. Visual artists. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, cousins, and friends. They come from communities all over the state of Minnesota and beyond.

For many of our students, their first MPWW class is their first exposure to formal creative writing education. Many students take one or two MPWW classes every year. A culture of mentorship has grown around MPWW’s programming, and more advanced writers often serve as mentors and tutors to beginning writers inside the facilities.

Our students, and incarcerated people in general, defy any reductive description or stereotype. As one student told us, “The full breadth of the human experience is absolutely present behind these walls.”

The demographics of our classrooms represent the demographics of the broader prison population, which is disproportionately composed of people of color. According to the Census Bureau and the Minnesota Department of Corrections, African Americans make up only 7% of the state's population but comprise 37% of its prison population. Indigenous people make up 1.4% of Minnesota's population and 9.3% of the prison population. Our classrooms reﬂect these demographics, and MPWW's work has an outsized effect on these groups.

What are the classes like?

A typical MPWW class looks very similar to a college or university creative writing class offered at the undergraduate (sometimes graduate) level. Most classes are 10-15 weeks long, meet weekly, and include 30 contact hours between instructors and students. We often do a craft lesson, discussion of last week’s reading assignments, a writing prompt, and a workshop. Instructors provide individualized feedback on each students’ work. We emphasize revision and encourage students to discover their own creative voice.

Can I come observe a class?

Sorry, no. We don’t allow that under any circumstances. We often get requests from people who are interested in prison work for academic or artistic reasons. Our students are not research subjects and our classes are not observatories. We’re happy you’re interested in this work, but please bear in mind our students are writers learning their craft, not subjects for your internships, novel, film project, or PhD thesis.

What kinds of programming do you offer besides creative writing classes?

In addition to creative writing classes, MPWW facilitates a long-term, one-to-one mail mentor program, in which incarcerated writers and experienced writers and editors outside of prison exchange monthly correspondence. Mentees send 10-40 pages of creative work each month, and mentors respond with detailed feedback, writing exercises, reading assignments, etc. The Mentor Program provides an opportunity for MPWW students to continue to receive artistic guidance and encouragement outside of the classroom. Mentor pairings can last up to four years.

Additionally, to create opportunities for students to showcase their work, we facilitate an annual letterpress broadside contest, hold public readings of student work, sponsor Writers Collectives in five facilities, offer re-entry programming to students who have recently come home, and publish an annual anthology of our students’ writing, which is curated by an editorial board of incarcerated students.

Staff

Jennifer Bowen

(she/her)
Founder and Artistic Director
jennifer@mnprisonwriting.org

Jennifer Bowen founded MPWW in 2011 after teaching with six dynamic writers. Her essays appear in, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Orion, The Sun, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize Best, the Arts & Letters Prize, Tim McGinnis Award, Bread Loaf and Jerome Foundation support, among others. She lives in Saint Paul.

Mike Alberti

(he/him)
Executive Director
mike@mnprisonwriting.org

Mike Alberti has been an administrator for MPWW since 2016, when he graduated from the University of Minnesota with his MFA in Creative Writing. Mike’s fiction has been published in many venues, and his first book, Some People Let You Down, won the 2020 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico and now lives in Minneapolis. In addition to his work with MPWW, he teaches at Century College.

Su Hwang

(she/her)
Community Engagement Manager
su@mnprisonwriting.org

Su Hwang is a poet, activist, stargazer, and the author of Bodega (Milkweed Editions), which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and was named a finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Born in Seoul, Korea, she was raised in New York then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. A recipient of the Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, she is a cofounder of Poetry Asylum and lives in Minneapolis.

Ari Tison

(she/her)
Mentor Coordinator
ari@mnprisonwriting.org

Ari Tison is a Bribri American poet and author of hybrid novel Saints of the Household (FSG/BFYR 2023). Her work is forthcoming in a number of anthologies including Our Shadows Have Claws (Algonquin 2022). Her poetry and essays have been published in various literary journals including Yellow Medicine Review, Rock & Sling, and Poetry’s first issue for young people. Ari serves as the mentor coordinator for Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Rachel Moritz

(she/her)
Program Assistant
rachel@mnprisonwriting.org

Rachel Moritz is a poet, essayist, and teaching artist who's been an instructor with MPWW since 2015. She's the author of two books of poetry, Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017) and Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), as well as five poetry chapbooks. Rachel is the recipient of grants and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. She lives in Minneapolis.

Board

Michael Kleber-Diggs

(he/him)
President, Board of Directors
michael@mnprisonwriting.org

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. Michael teaches creative writing for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, at Augsburg University, and at the Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. He has extensive board experience in a variety of nonprofit arts and service organizations and currently serves at the President of MPWW's Board of Directors.

Charlene Charles

Marketing specialist

Amirah Ellison

Law Student

Chris Fischbach, Treasurer

Literary agent and consultant, Fischbach Creative

V.V. Ganeshananthan

Novelist and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UMN

Kevin Reese

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Until We Are All Free

Paul Van Dyke

Writer

Bethany Whitehead

Arts administrator

Instructors

MPWW employs over 20 core instructors, each of whom is an accomplished local writer and teacher. We may be biased, but we think our instructors are among the best in the country. Not only are they award-winning writers in their own right, they teach innovative and rigorous classes, travel to facilities across the state, navigate the shifting demands of different carceral systems, and bolster the organization outside the classroom.

More about our instructors