The video will play here for anyone who did not register. It will also stream on tje OPL Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BiblioOttawaLibrary
CBC’s Adrian Harewood sits down with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges to discuss the crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose. His latest, The Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison is a haunting and powerfully moving book that gives voice to the poorest among us and lays bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives.
Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for a month in 2018 to sold-out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, and later be published, students gave words to the grief and suffering they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams.
The class’s artistic and personal discovery, as well as transformation, is chronicled in heart-breaking detail in The Class. This book gives a human face and a voice to those our society too often demonizes and abandons. It exposes the terrible crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in Partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
This book could change everything. It could change our minds. It could buttress our hearts.
The video will play here for anyone who did not register. It will also stream on tje OPL Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BiblioOttawaLibrary
CBC’s Adrian Harewood sits down with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges to discuss the crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose. His latest, The Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison is a haunting and powerfully moving book that gives voice to the poorest among us and lays bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives.
Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for a month in 2018 to sold-out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, and later be published, students gave words to the grief and suffering they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams.
The class’s artistic and personal discovery, as well as transformation, is chronicled in heart-breaking detail in The Class. This book gives a human face and a voice to those our society too often demonizes and abandons. It exposes the terrible crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in Partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
