Prisoners Literature Project

PLP: Summer 2021 update

August 2021  |  Published in Announcements, Latest News

Dear supporters and donors to the PLP,

We wanted to update you all on the post-pandemic status of the Prisoners Literature Project (http://www.prisonlit.org), share the packed state of our library thanks to your donations (see above!), and tell you what we’d love your help with.

Firstly, we are back to doing in-person book packing sessions in our Berkeley, CA headquarters (Grassroots House), sending packages of books to incarcerated U.S. folks who request them. We’re using all vaccinated volunteers, masking at all times, and the doors/windows open. We’re doing solo sessions, or running with a limited number of group volunteers (up to 8 per session), so sessions are by invitation only.

If you live in the Bay Area and are interested in being given access to our online calendar so you can pick a session to attend, please visit our ‘volunteering’ page and fill out the Google Form linked there.

(We’re planning to run with this private session format for at least the medium-term. And apologies if we don’t get back to you straight away due to demand.)



Secondly, wanted to share (above) just one of many thank-you letters we’ve been receiving from incarcerated folks. Especially during these rough COVID times, the incarcerated genuinely appreciate getting high quality books for free from us. So thank you for making that possible!

On that front, we’ve been using some of your funds to get great ‘remainder’ books. But we’d love you to consider buying us some of the books on our wishlist. These are some of our most-requested books, but are very tricky for us to find remaindered.

Every book matters, and will be sent to someone who requested it, so help us out if you can! (We also have an alternate wishlist at local bookstore Pegasus Books, if you’d prefer not to use Amazon.)



Finally, we have even more plans for the future. We’ve added a storage unit relatively recently, to help with the overflow of high quality books, we’re working with many local Bay Area book stores to get high quality donations from their customers, and lots more besides.

Overall, we are ramping back up towards sending 250 packages of books per week – so 1,000 packages and 3-4,000 books per month – to the incarcerated across the entire U.S. And we appreciate your financial donations towards postage and other costs to keep doing this. We’ll send out another update later this year!

Thanks again & take care,
Prisoners Literature Project.