When Writing Is Both Sentence and Liberation: The 2026 Writing Freedom Fellows

There is a particular kind of silence that surrounds certain kinds of writing — the writing that happens in the margins of systems designed to suppress it. I think of this every time I encounter a literary prize or fellowship that insists on centering voices the mainstream apparatus would prefer to forget. The Writing Freedom Fellowship, now in its third year, is such an insistence.

Launched in 2024 by Haymarket Books and supported by the Mellon Foundation, the program this year names twenty writers whose relationship to the criminal legal system — as incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, or those whose families carry that weight — has shaped, interrupted, or deepened their literary practice. The names in this cohort carry histories. Reginald Dwayne Betts, a MacArthur Fellow and the founder of Freedom Reads (a program that places curated libraries in prison cells), has long argued that what we read changes how we understand what it means to be free. Mahogany L. Browne, whose collection Chrome Valley won the Paterson Poetry Prize in 2024, writes with a musician's ear for how language can hold grief without flattening it. Karisma Price, a 2025 Whiting Award winner, brings an archival sensibility to pain that refuses easy resolution.

What the fellowship understands — and what is easy to forget in literary culture's tendency to aestheticize suffering — is that writing produced in or near incarceration is not primarily an act of self-expression. It is an act of survival and of resistance. Program Director Jyothi Natarajan of Haymarket Books framed the urgency plainly: "With the dramatic expansion of the carceral state, the work of Writing Freedom couldn't be more urgent." That sentence lands differently in a political moment when book bans and prison censorship often operate from the same bureaucratic instinct — the belief that certain people should not have access to certain words.

The selection panel this year included writers Jaquira Díaz, Safia Elhillo, Luis J. Rodriguez, Sarah Schulman, and Jenisha Watts — a group whose own work deals in dislocation, borders, and testimony. There is something worth noting in the curatorial care here: the fellowship does not treat writing from the margins as exotic or redemptive. It treats it as necessary.

I find myself returning to a Tove Jansson passage I read long ago, something about how the smallest rooms, when filled with the right attention, become spaces of extraordinary expansion. The twenty writers named this year are working in exactly such rooms. One hopes the rest of the literary world is paying attention.