Please join us in congratulating PRC Faculty Scholar Dr. Sarah Brayne on her new award from The Mellon Foundation! Mellon awarded Sarah Brayne and Adela Pineda Franco $500,000 to fund a partnership between the Texas Prison Education Initiative (TPEI) and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS). The grant is through their Higher Learning Program.
The funded project, Pido la Palabra: A Texas Prison Literature Project for Social Justice and the Imaginary Imagination, is aimed at creating Spanish-language creative writing courses within prisons. An associated class, Writing on the Edge: Literature and Incarceration, will be taught at the University of Texas for undergraduate and graduate students. The project also involves recording a documentary for Texas Public Radio, creating an anthology of student work, and developing a prison library.
About the Texas Prison Education Initiative
Founded in 2017 by Sarah Brayne and then-PhD student Lindsay Bing, the Texas Prison Education Initiative (TPEI) offers free, credit-bearing college classes to incarcerated people in Texas prisons. Since then, TPEI has expanded rapidly—they have now taught hundreds of students across multiple prisons credit-bearing classes including Sociology, Physics, and Mathematics, English, Rhetoric and Writing, Philosophy, African American Women’s History, Urban Studies/Geography as well as College Preparatory Math, College Preparatory Writing. They have approximately 100 faculty, postdoc, graduate and undergraduate student volunteers from colleges and schools across the university. “This support from Mellon will help us create more educational opportunities for incarcerated people in Texas,” says Dr. Brayne. “I am excited that we will also be able to include more UT Austin undergraduate and graduate students in the work TPEI does in prisons.”
To learn more about the Texas Prison Education Initiative and how you can help, please visit their website here.
About LLILAS
With 161 affiliated faculty working across campus, and a longstanding partnership with the Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS is well positioned to work closely with TPEI for the successful implementation of this project. The Benson’s vast resources, including major literary archives, are part of the bedrock of LLILAS student, scholarly, and public engagement programs, allowing the integration of humanistic inquiry into every aspect of the institute’s socially driven mission. LLILAS Benson public engagement initiatives have served Latina/o and Latin American–born residents across Texas for many years through partnerships with minority-serving institutions and nonprofit organizations. LLILAS has worked closely with the UT Department of Spanish and Portuguese to incorporate Latino/a and Latin American Studies content into literature and language instruction and train undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students in bilingual education. Against the backdrop of UT Austin’s recent designation as a Hispanic-serving institution, LLILAS Benson’s role as a hub for learning and scholarship by, for, and about Latinos/as and Latin Americans is even more significant.
