Ithaca College

Tom Kerr, Associate Professor of Writing, presented his paper, "Trading Letters, Trading Places: One Cross-Country College-Prison Collaboration," at the Annual Conference on College Composition and Communication, held in Atlanta, April 6-9.

Presented in a workshop titled "Prison Writing: Pedagogy, Representation, Research and Action," the paper describes how one of Kerr's Spring 2010 Argument classes employed letters--solicited from and received by the Argument class from a men's prison writing group in New Folsom (CA)--as the basis for their own essays on the prison crisis in the U.S. These essays were eventually combined into a booklet and sent back to the New Folsom writers, completing the exchange characterized by one student as "transformative" (Sam G.!) and by one prison writer & writing teacher as "splendidly real and inspirational for me" (Spoon Jackson).