Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation are proud to introduce the third cohort of the Writing Freedom Fellowship, recognizing twenty emerging, mid-career, and established poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers whose lives and work have been impacted by the carceral system. 

Launched in 2024, Writing Freedom provides fellows with professional development support, sustained community-building opportunities, and an award. With this third cohort, the fellowship has now honored 60 writers whose work expands and reshapes the literary landscape in the U.S. and beyond.

“Writing Freedom is recognition and growth and community and, now, lineage,” said 2025 Writing Freedom Fellow B Batchelor. “It is the best thing to ever happen for my writing, for the marginalized and oft-silenced community I represent, and for the verdant path ahead.”

The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. Beyond prisons and jails, the U.S.’s sprawling carceral system encompasses immigrant detention and deportation, parole and probation, the family policing system, and involuntary commitment. Sustained by criminalization, surveillance, and punishment, this system negatively impacts the lives of countless individuals and their families.

Writers impacted by the carceral system are underrepresented in the literary world. In addition to censorship and retaliation, many are subject to an array of harms including isolation, financial hardship, social stigma, family separation, and the lasting consequences of confinement. Writing Freedom recognizes and elevates the urgency and brilliance of these voices.

“Writing can feel like a solitary practice — work that happens behind closed doors being easily mistaken for silence,” said 2025 Writing Freedom Fellow Faylita Hicks. “But fellowships like Writing Freedom make it possible for writers, especially those with the direct experience of trauma from carceral systems, to move their words from private conversations into public impact. This award has given me the space and time to ask the hard questions my work requires, and the courage to ask them when asking feels dangerous.”

Following a multi-step nomination and review process in which the names of writers under consideration were not disclosed, the 2026 Writing Freedom Fellows were selected by a group of five esteemed writers: Whiting Award-winning writer Jaquira Díaz, poet and California Book Award-winner Safia Elhillo, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, esteemed writer and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman, and Atlantic staff writer Jenisha Watts. 

“The 2026 cohort is a diverse group of immensely-talented poets, essayists, fiction writers, playwrights, and journalists doing incredibly important work despite unimaginable obstacles,” shared acclaimed writer Jaquira Díaz, a member of the 2026 Writing Freedom Selection Committee. “The work of these twenty writers is wise, intellectually rigorous, deeply moving, innovative, meaningful, artful. What a gift to discover their work. I am rooting for them all.”

The 2026 fellows span genres and generations, with writing that confronts and illuminates themes ranging from kinship and exile to militarism, migration, and life on death row. 

“The community of writers we are championing grows with the recognition of these tremendous writers. Haymarket Books is proud to continue elevating their necessary work,” said Jyothi Natarajan, Program Director at Haymarket Books. “With the dramatic expansion of the carceral state, the work of Writing Freedom couldn't be more urgent.”

Read more about these writers on the Writing Freedom website, where you can listen to short audio readings by each fellow. 

Meet the 2026 Writing Freedom Fellows

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, memoirist, and essayist. His next memoir, Off the Cuff, will be released by W.W. Norton. Betts has earned multiple fellowships, including one from the MacArthur Foundation. He is the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads.

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator. An NY Emmy, NAACP, and Audie award finalist, Browne is a 2022 Kennedy Center Next 50 fellow and inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center. Her collection Chrome Valley won the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her YA novel was longlisted for the National Book Award. She holds an honorary doctorate from Marymount College. 

Demetrius “Meech” Buckley, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is published in The Rumpus, The Yale Review, the Marshall Project’s Life Inside, and Prism. His essay “Death Around Da Corner” won Editors’ Choice Selection in CRAFT’s 2024 essay contest. His collection Here Is Home won Cave Canem’s 2021 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize. Buckley edits Apogee's Freedom Meridian. 

Jill Damatac, a writer and a filmmaker, is the author of Dirty Kitchen, a food memoir of growing up undocumented. Born in Manila, Philippines, in the final years of the Marcos dictatorship, Damatac immigrated to the United States as a child.

Barbara Fant is the author of three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Joy in the Belly of a Riot. A native of Ohio, she is a Healing Centered Engagement specialist who believes in the healing power of the arts.

Benjamin Frandsen is a poet, essayist, and advocate whose writing on incarceration, redemption, and resilience appears in exCHANGE magazine, Iconoclast, PEN America’s prison writing anthologies, UCLA Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and other outlets. As founder/executive director of the Ben Free Project, he hosts the Ben Free Podcast and teaches in California prisons.

Kennedy Amenya Gisege is a Kenyan visual artist and the author of the book Twenty-One Birthdays from Lost Kite Editions. He believes his village Ibacho gave the world a lot of good things, but he wants to be the best thing that came from there.

Sheree L. Greer is a Black lesbian writer and founder of Kitchen Table Literary Arts in Tampa, Florida. Published widely, Greer holds fellowships from VONA/VOICES, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Yaddo, Ragdale, and Lost and Found Lab. Her award-winning nonfiction has been named in Best American Essays.

Randall Horton is the recipient of two American Book Awards. His latest memoir, Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays, is published by Northwestern University Press. Horton is a professor of English at the University of New Haven. 

Donny Jackson is a lifelong poet, a doctor of clinical psychology, and a documentary television producer. Jackson was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2021, Kirkus Reviews named his poetry collection, boy, one of the “Best Indie Books of the Year.” Jackson currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Lyle C. May is a journalist and author of Witness: An Insider's Narrative of the Carceral State. His writing appears in numerous publications and law journals. When not writing, May frequently lectures on the politics and policies of mass incarceration for university classes, academic conferences, and online events.

Saretta Morgan is the author of the poetry collection Alt-Nature. Her work is informed by lived practices at the intersections of grassroots social and environmental justice movements, and by personal and intergenerational experiences of incarceration and land stewardship. She engages poetry and landscaping as technologies to map and practice collective health and belonging.

Jassmine Parks is a Detroit-born poet and multidisciplinary artist. Her work has appeared in Obsidian, Detroit MetroTimes, Clearline Magazine, among others. She has received fellowship support from the Watering Hole, Torch Literary Arts, PEN America, Vermont Studio Center, and Kresge Arts in Detroit. 

Alan Pelaez Lopez, born in Mexico, is a Black Zapotec writer based in Oakland, California. Their creative writing and theoretical work takes up forced migration, incarceration, solitary confinement, and crip futures. Following Indigenous linguistic activism, they write against vanishment.

Karisma Price is the author of I’m Always So Serious, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick. She is a 2025 Whiting Award winner and holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Tulane University.

Adam Roberts is a memoirist and essayist from Long Island who spent twenty-six years incarcerated in New York State. Released in October 2025, he writes about survival, transformation, and the human cost of mass incarceration. His work has appeared in the Marshall Project’s Life Inside, Hyperallergic, and the Vera Institute of Justice’s News & Stories.

Watani Stiner is a memoirist and former Black Power activist whose writing explores revolution, exile, captivity, and reconciliation with family and history. He is the author of To Stumble Is Not to Fall: A Revolutionary’s Journey from United States’ Injustice and lives in Oakland, California, where he continues writing and mentoring younger voices.

Derek R. Trumbo Sr., an essayist and playwright, is a multi-time PEN Prison Writing Award winner. Creator of the series “Never Eat the Candy on Your Pillow: A Commonsense Guide to Prison,” published by Prism, Trumbo is currently polishing his short story collection Palpable Prisons. He mentors, instructs, and facilitates writing circles with currently incarcerated writers.

Marco Verdoni is an MFA graduate of the New Writers Project and a Fulbright scholar from Saginaw, Michigan. His award-winning work has appeared in Fourth Genre and Akashic Books’ Prison Noir anthology.

Bernardo Wade serves as assistant editor and poetry editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He is a Wallace Stegner fellow and has published his poems in The Nation, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is infatuated with Ed Roberson's question, “Can you O.D. on life?” 

“These twenty extraordinary writers underscore the creative power and vision of those who push the possibilities of the written word despite the confines of our country’s carceral system,” said Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation. “As part of Mellon’s robust commitment to the literary arts, we are proud to support them and the remarkable work they continue to create."

For more information about the Writing Freedom Fellowship, please contact [email protected].