Free Thinkers Book Fellowship

Free Thinkers Book Fellowship is sponsored by Look2Justice (L2J). A two-year fellowship that guides experienced incarcerated writers through the development, writing, and publication of a full-length nonfiction book.

The people who live inside the carceral system carry knowledge the public rarely gets to see. The Bridge is L2J's national narrative change initiative, supporting incarcerated writers, journalists, artists, and filmmakers in telling their own stories on the largest possible stages to humanize our incarcerated communities. Their essays appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and many more.

Their voices air on radio and podcasts nationwide. The Bridge is designed to bring incarcerated creators into the mainstream through published writings, documentaries, podcasts, radio, and art in service of something larger: changing the narratives that hold unjust systems in place while developing impacted creators to tell their stories.

We understand that the dehumanization embedded in how incarcerated people are portrayed in public life is not separate from the policy failures that work to demonize and ostracize them. It is the foundation those injustices are built on. The Bridge exists to dismantle them, one story at a time.

When we see incarcerated people as full human beings, as writers, journalists, thinkers, and artists, the policy arguments we make land differently. The coalitions we build hold differently. Storytelling is the transformation Click to navigate straight to a section, or scroll to explore.

Writers Development Program Supporting incarcerated writers to publish and be heard. A national network helping incarcerated writers navigate publishing. free thinkers book fellowship Supporting incarcerated writers to develop and publish full-length books.

Broadcasting unfiltered voices from inside prison to the outside world. Exploring connection, justice, and humanity across prison walls. Raw, independent publications sharing life inside, by those living it.

DOCUMENTARY, FILM & MEDIA Centering incarcerated people as storytellers of their own lives. ART EXHIBITIONS, SCREENINGS & EVENTS Bringing stories from inside into public spaces for change. WRITERS DEVeLOPMENT PROGRAM The Writers Development Program is where incarcerated writers find their voice and their audience.

Led from the inside by incarcerated journalists Christopher Blackwell and Antoine E. Davis, and by Deborah Zalesne on the outside, the program supports incarcerated writers across the country to craft and publish essays on daily life inside: solitude, family, illness, identity, parenting, and the conditions of confinement. Professor Deborah Zalesne Incarcerated writers often work in profound isolation.

No colleagues down the hall, no writing communities to plug into, no easy way to navigate the publishing world from behind prison walls. The National Writers Cohort exists to change that. Directed by journalist Ethan Corey, it is a national network for experienced incarcerated writers that offers support with pitches, submissions, research, and editor relationships.

The cohort removes the practical barriers to publishing so writers can focus on what they do best, share their environments and lived experiences in an effort to educate society. The Free Thinkers Book Fellowship is for incarcerated writers ready to go long.

A two-year fellowship directed by Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist Vauhini Vara, it guides experienced incarcerated writers through the development, writing, and publication of a full-length nonfiction book. The traditional publishing pipeline has never been built with incarcerated writers in mind. The Free Thinkers Fellowship exists to change that.

Through the wire radio show Through the Wire is a groundbreaking radio show on KVRU 105. 7FM hosted by incarcerated journalists Christopher Blackwell and Antoine Davis. Recorded from inside prison walls, the show brings candid, unfiltered voices from inside directly to listeners on the outside.

Segments include interviews with changemakers, slices of daily life from prison, listener call-ins and messages from incarcerated people to their loved ones. Christopher Blackwell, an incarcerated journalist, and Katherin Hervey, a documentary filmmaker and lawyer, had an idea: could a podcast, partly recorded behind prison walls, help us uncover what truly connects us?

Chris and Katherin have been friends for over ten years, and their conversations explore what it means to live a meaningful life wherever you are. Together with restorative justice advocates, survivors, and people whose stories upend what we think we know about justice and healing, they dive into the messy, beautiful complexity of being alive — discovering that our broken parts hold our greatest strengths.

Zines are one of the oldest forms of independent publishing and one of the few that can cross prison walls. L2J's zines are created by incarcerated writers, artists and community partners; and distributed both inside prisons and in public venues, reaching audiences who rarely encounter this work. Each zine is a document of lives lived inside: solitude, survival, identity, caregiving, resistance, and community.

They are raw and honest primary sources. Stories about incarceration are overwhelmingly told about people, not by them. Media portrayals flatten individuals into stereotypes: criminal, victim, statistic.

Look2Justice exists to change who gets to tell the story. L2J partners with filmmakers to produce documentary work that carries incarcerated voices directly to public audiences. Not films made about incarcerated people, but films made with them, centering their expertise, their leadership, and their lives.

The Producers Lab is a launch initiative that equips incarcerated creators to produce and distribute stories across digital platforms. Over time, the cumulative effect is a measurable shift in cultural narrative: incarcerated creators move from being the subjects of stories to the authors of stories, helping to shape how the country thinks about them. Click on a title to explore more!

the insiders producers lab ART EXHIBITIONS, SCREENINGS Look2Justice brings art, film, and story into public spaces where they can be seen, heard, and felt. Some of this work is created from inside prison walls. All of it is rooted in the humanity of people that the system too often erases.

Documentary screenings are followed by panels that put incarcerated voices at the center of the conversation. Community gatherings, listening sessions, and town halls create space for those impacted by the system to share their experiences and build connections across the divide. Vauhini is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist, journalist, and editor, and the author of three books.

She has written and edited for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, where she led a special series on criminal justice, and has mentored dozens of writers through the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and the Periplus mentorship collective. Several of her former mentees, including the incarcerated journalist John J. Lennon, have released books with major publishers.

Christopher directs organizational strategy, sets campaign priorities, and leads programmatic decisions from inside prison. He is an award-winning journalist whose writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, and many more.

He was awarded Narratively's prestigious 2023 Memoir Grand Prize, a Galaxy Fellowship in 2024, the 2024 Incarcerated Journalist of the Year by Prison Journalism Project, and was the first incarcerated person to present live with The Moth at their 2025 Community Showcase event in NYC. He is co-author of Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement (Pluto Press, 2025).

Chris dedicates his time to advocacy, education, and storytelling, amplifying the voices of those impacted by the criminal legal system. Dr. Chelsea Moore holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington, serves as Smart Justice Policy Program Director at the ACLU of Washington, and sits on multiple statewide criminal justice task forces.

She brings the perspective of a family member living the consequences of incarceration every day, ensuring that loved ones are represented at every level of L2J's advocacy. A former Los Angeles Public Defender, award-winning documentary filmmaker, restorative justice practitioner, and J. D.

from Loyola Law School, Katherin brings deep firsthand knowledge of the criminal legal system to building the partnerships and resources that sustain and grow L2J's work. Earlier in her career, she was Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Shades of Contradiction , a nationally distributed arts and culture magazine dedicated to critical thinking and creative action.

Her latest film, The Prison Within (Amazon Prime, Discovery+), has won multiple awards, including the Evident Change Media for a Just Society Award, recognizing impactful work in the criminal legal system. KJ brings lived experience and professional rigor to managing L2J's program operations, curriculum development, and partner relationships.

A University of Washington graduate in Law and Policy, he is the organizational backbone that keeps L2J's programs running with integrity and impact. Producer & Sound Engineer Colby is an audio engineer and musician living in Seattle. Currently serving a 63-year sentence at Washington Corrections Center, Antoine is a licensed minister at Freedom Church of Seattle and founder of the Inside Out Mentoring Program.

He coordinates L2J's network of 15 paid inside organizers embedded across every major Washington State facility and leads the Washington Youth Empowerment Coalition alongside his wife Brittani Davis from the outside.

PROFESSOR DEBorah ZALESNE Professor Deborah Zalesne is a tenured professor of Law at CUNY School of Law and a widely published scholar on race and gender justice, solitary confinement, legal pedagogy, and the use of contracts to empower disenfranchised communities.

She has authored or co-authored three books and over fifty scholarly articles and is co-author of Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement, bringing deep expertise in critical legal scholarship to the program’s editorial vision. Kwaneta Harris is an award-winning journalist currently serving a fifty-year sentence in a Texas prison.

An abolition feminist, her work focuses on the intersection of gender, race, and place, and has appeared in PEN America, Truthout, Slate, the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, Teen Vogue, Lux, and Prism, among others. She was interviewed by Al Jazeera for a documentary on solitary confinement and is currently working on a book about youth from juvenile facilities now held in adult solitary.

She is a recipient of the prestigious 2024 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellowship. Ethan Corey is a writer, editor, and researcher with more than 10 years of experience working as a journalist.

As research & projects editor at The Appeal, he helped coordinate the publication's collaborations with incarcerated writers, which have included award-winning investigative journalism, first-person essays reprinted in books and national newspapers, and an original podcast that reached thousands of listeners. Across a phone line, two men reach toward each other through time and consequence.

Christopher Blackwell, serving forty-five years for murder, has become an award-winning journalist whose words carry compassion from within confinement. David Hackney, once a federal prosecutor and now a Washington State Representative, served the system that condemned Chris. Their conversation is quiet and searching.

They speak of childhood, the choices that shaped them, and the harm they cannot change. Between them grows a fragile recognition that both have caused pain and both are learning to live in accountability through the remorse of the harm they caused. What begins as dialogue becomes communion.

This is a story about courage through vulnerability, accountability spoken in human terms, and the small miracle of connection across the walls we build. Christopher Blackwell and Eugene Youngblood walked the same path inside: same programs, same sacrifices, same accountability. One came home.

One didn't. Not because the men are different. Because the process is.

Life/Time exposes the lie at the heart of American incarceration: that transformation earns freedom. Christopher was denied clemency in Washington. The Mississippi Five, five women with decades of documented growth and zero threat to public safety, have been denied parole every time they've appeared before the board.

The goalposts keep moving. Life/Time asks what it means that we keep people caged after they've changed, and what it costs all of us when we do. Look2Justice is proud to support Resilience Inside, a documentary created in partnership with Huy and the University of Washington Prison History Project.

The film traces fifty years of Indigenous resistance and cultural survival in Washington State prisons, through the voices of elders, organizers, and incarcerated relatives. It documents the first prison powwows at Walla Walla, highlights the barriers Native women face at the Washington Corrections Center for Women, and honors ceremony as a living practice of survival, memory, and cultural continuity.

This is the kind of storytelling The Bridge exists to amplify. The dominant narrative of incarceration is overwhelmingly told about people, not by them. The Insiders Producers Lab exists to change that.

Inspired by programs like the Film Independent and Sundance Institute Producers Labs, we are developing a first-of-its-kind media training program that supports incarcerated creators to produce and distribute their own stories across film, podcast, digital content, and social platforms. Participants work on real projects, building skills and bodies of work they can carry into their own futures. We love to hear from you.

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Look2Justice is a network of system - impacted leaders transforming the criminal legal system through education, advocacy, and narrative change. ABOUT US THE BRIDGE INSIDE-OUT ADVOACY YOUTH EMPOWERMENT EVENTS DONATE & SPONSOR