Offered at the University of Texas in Spring 2023 and Spring 2024, first by Professor Adela Pineda and later by Professor Gabriela Polit, Writing on the Edge: Literature and Incarceration is a course designed to train a new generation of creative writing instructors for prison education programs. One of the key components of the broader Pido la Palabra project, this seminar combines rigorous academic inquiry with hands-on pedagogical training.
Through the analysis of literary and theoretical texts written by and about incarcerated individuals across the U.S., Latin America, and Caribbean, students examine literature’s critical potential to interrogate mass incarceration and its entanglement with systemic inequalities. The course explores the limits and possibilities of prison writing as a restorative practice and as a tool for reimagining society.
Adopting a hemispheric approach, the seminar has featured guest lectures from renowned writers and educators with extensive experience teaching creative writing in Latin American prisons, such as José Zuleta, Juan Pablo Parchuc, Ana Laura Camarda, Sara López Ellitsgaard, among others.
The course also guides students through the process of designing and implementing a creative writing program in Spanish within the multilingual context of Texas prisons, addressing key methodological, ethical, and practical questions.
We are proud to share some of the outstanding work created by students in this course—beautiful and powerful pieces that reflect on the notion of “expanded prisons” from a critical and deeply sensitive perspective.