Please consider shopping off these wish lists (#PrisonBooksWishlists) or stopping by the stores if you live in the Bay Area:
Books Inc. (Berkeley)
East Bay Booksellers (Oakland)
Green Apple Books (San Francisco)
Pegasus Books (Berkeley)
Cape & Cowl Comics (Oakland, in-store sales only)
These donated books will allow PLP to fulfill a range of requests from incarcerated letter writers including these recent ones:
We’re very happy to share some of the wonderful thank you letters we’ve received over the past months. These notes have helped keep us warm this unusually cold and wet California winter. Enjoy!
For Black History Month, we’ve curated a special list of high-demand books and topics. We’d love any and all help getting them into our library for distribution to folks behind bars. Thanks!
Here’s the local Pegasus Books wishlist, if you’d like to buy: https://www.pegasusbookstore.com/wishlist/571
And here’s the Amazon.com version of the list: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/OZTZRXXUXKNI
As always, we really appreciate your help!
Many, many thanks to Tor Books for donating hundreds of titles to us! (They’ll get sent out – for free – to incarcerated folks across the U.S. who requested these genres.)
Some of the prisoners we send in to demand new or ‘new-like’ books, so it’s particularly helpful to have publishers send us their ‘advanced reader copies’ or remainders. If you can also help with this, please contact us!
As we round out the year at the Prisoners Literature Project, we wanted to thank you all for keeping up on us, volunteering, or financially supporting us during the year with donations.
It’s not too late to make tax deductible-donations to our programs before year-end! But this newsletter is mainly sent to celebrate a year in which we:
– Sent out over 10,000 book packages (and 30,000+ books) to incarcerated folks in almost every U.S. state.
– Moved into our new library space in Berkeley, CA, as showcased in our ‘what happens in volunteer sessions?’ blog.
– Hosted over 150 group volunteer sessions, with many of you helping us to fulfil requests.
– Partnered with over 10 local Bay Area book stores featuring in-store displays, and 1,000+ books bought from wishlists by online/in-person customers.
– Received scores of thank you letters from appreciative book recipients and readers.
As we move into 2023, the pace of request letters we receive is increasing, thanks to word of mouth on the quality & quantity of books we send out for free. (We received 1,226 individual letters in a recent month, 60% up on mid-way through the pandemic!)
That’s why we appreciate your help with what we do. Our list of requests to answer is never-ending – but we love doing it, as can be seen from this new San Francisco Public Library virtual panel on our work. as part of the One City One Book festival.
Happy New Year, and thanks again for keeping up with us!
The Prisoners Literature Project volunteers.
The Prisoners Literature Project partnered with the San Francisco Public Library, as part of its One City One Book festival on December 1st, to share about our work sending books to incarcerated people across the country.
Check out this thoughtful and informative video. People in the audience asked great questions!
Check out this wonderful new video that explains more about our long-running books-to-prisons program. (Thanks to Krishna Hawk for making it!)
While we have your attention —
Our work at the Prisoners Literature Project continues, sending out 1,000+ book packages per month to incarcerated folks all over the U.S. But we need your help to keep sending high quality books & paying for postage!
So we’re delighted to announce that if you donate now to PLP, leading up to this Giving Tuesday on November 29, 2022, all of your generous financial contributions will be matched up to $4,444, thanks to some anonymous donors! Please double your impact by donating now through Tuesday the 29th.
Our primary costs continue to be postage (thousands of dollars a month!) and bulk orders of books we simply can’t keep in stock due to demand.
Books on self-education, GED study materials, and self-sufficiency/tradeskills books on building and construction are always in extremely high demand, and we’ll use some of your donations to get even more.
If you can contribute, thank you so sincerely for making the Prisoners Literature Project part of your Giving Tuesday generosity!
This is just one of many great thank you notes that we have received recently.
The Prisoners Literature Project is excited to partner with the San Francisco Public Library, as part of its One City One Book festival, to share about our work sending books to incarcerated people across the country.
Join us virtually on December 1st at 7pm to hear from PLP volunteers about restrictions our criminal legal system places on reading and what we do to get books inside. We’d love to bring more perspectives to this conversation.
Register here: https://sfpl.org/events/2022/12/01/panel-prisoners-literature-project
In addition, if you’ve received books from the PLP while incarcerated and would like to share your experience at this virtual event, please reach out via prisonlit@gmail.com. (We’re able to offer compensation in thanks for your participation in this panel.)
Banned Books week (Sept. 18-24) is upon us once again. Books-to-prisons groups such as PLP contend with the reality of book banning and restrictions every day in the course of our efforts to get reading material into the hands of eager incarcerated people. We have a thick binder that lists the book sending restrictions for prisons across the country. It’s a lot to track and it’s ever changing! Here is one page for CA prisons:
A prison may require new books only or newish or used but with strict guidelines about no text underlining, highlighting, or “suspicious stains.” This clearly limits our ability to accept donated books! Each letter must be marked with its relevant restrictions so we can do our best to ensure the books are successfully received by the letter writer. A few examples:
This article “The Cruel Practice of Banning Books Behind Bars” provides an update on the current state of the prison book banning challenge.
Therefore, we’re super pleased that a generous donor has offered to match the total of all books purchased from our independent bookstore wishlists (or in-store displays) during the Banned Books 2022 week. PLP has four local bookstores who are partnering with us for the matching grant. These purchases will help us “beat the ban” in instances where new books are required!
Please consider shopping off these wish lists or stopping by the stores if you live in the Bay Area:
Finally, because we have such fabulous and committed volunteers we thought we’d share some of them holding books that we CAN (well to most prisons) send to incarcerated readers. These are commonly requested books that we try to keep in stock via our wishlists!
Wow! This is a particularly great batch of letters we’ve received recently. It is our good fortune to have such appreciative book recipients and readers.
The Prisoners Literature Project is an inclusive, all-volunteer, grassroots nonprofit whose purpose is to encourage reading, the pursuit of knowledge, and self-determination among incarcerated people. By sending free reading materials to those behind bars, PLP aims to foster learning and critical thinking and help people prepare to lead successful lives after incarceration. We believe that all people have a right to read.
