Publications

Lo que tú no ves: Expressions from the Chicas in White

December 2024 — Pido la Palabra has reached a new milestone with the publication this week of Lo que tú no ves: Expressions from the Chicas in White, the second annual collection of poems and short prose by students at the Coleman Unit in Lockhart, Texas. This fall, they took a class taught by Professor Gabriela Polit (Department of Spanish and Portuguese) and PhD students Isabel Ibáñez de la Calle and Alex Voisine (GRAs), along with volunteer teachers Oscar Chaidez, Gabriel Noriega, and Yefferson Ospina. Read the magazine.

Deep Within: Expressions from the Chicas in White

December 2023 — We are thrilled to announce the publication of Deep Within: Expressions from the Chicas in White, a collection of poems and short prose pieces by Pido la Palabra students who reside at the Coleman Unit in Lockhart, Texas. The writings were produced in twice-weekly classes during the fall 2023 semester. View the magazine here.

A magazine cover with dark purple lettering on white background. The illustration is a pencil drawing of a woman's face (partial) and hand. She holds a flower near her ear that covers her eye. — *Cover of the 2023 publication of writings by Coleman students*

The texts assembled in the publication were written within the context of a bilingual creative writing course called Pido la Palabra, which was taught at Coleman and offered through the university extension program at the University of Texas at Austin under the auspices of the Texas Prison Education Initiative.

“The students enrolled in this course selected their own contributions and chose the title of the publication collectively,” wrote Professor Adela Pineda Franco, director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) and faculty in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. “The magazine is therefore the product of collaboration between the students and the three instructors of the course,” Pineda Franco, Gabriel Noriega, and Yefferson Ospina (Noriega and Ospina are PhD students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese).

_{In class at Gregory S. Coleman Unit, Lockhart Correctional Facility (photo: Octavio Kano-Galván)}

“At the Coleman prison, the students made literature something of their own,” wrote Pineda Franco in the magazine’s Introduction. “For them, the meaning of Pido la palabra involved a confrontation with their situation of imprisonment and with society’s legal apparatus, but it also led them to explore the relationship between life and literature. In these writings, the authors offer [the reader] courageous words of unquestionable sincerity.”