Introduction

Welcome to this collection of writing from Lewis-Clark State College students enrolled in our prison education program. I am so glad you are here!

LC State is one of only 11 approved Prison Education Programs in the nation. And it is one of only three institutions offering both associate and bachelor’s degrees with classes being taken online or in-person at facilities.

I have been teaching our corrections population since Fall 2024, instructing students in English 101, Writing/Rhetoric I. This semester, Spring 2025, I taught many of those same students and a number of new students in English 102, Writing/Rhetoric II. Most of the pieces you will read in this collection come from journal entries or research papers written in my English 102 course. However, a few pieces were written in a political science and another instructor’s English 101 class. Thank you to my colleagues and fellow prison education instructors, Dr. Leif Hoffmann and Lisa Goodrich, respectively, who allowed students to use papers written in their courses.

Thank you, too, to these individuals who wholeheartedly support LC State’s Prison Education Program: my supervisor Dr. Amanda VanLanen, Chair of the Humanities Division and Professor of History; Martin Gibbs, Dean of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Associate Professor of Spanish; Angela Wilson, Senior Instructional Designer; Dovie Willey, Adult & Corrections Education Director; and Dr. Cynthia Pemberton, President of Lewis-Clark State College.

Impressed and touched by the raw and honest writing by my students all semester, I had the idea to honor their hard work and persistence by publishing their work in an Open Education Resource (OER) that could be shared with the outside world. In this way, not only could I document the good writing of my students and provide a way to highlight their growth as students and humans but also spotlight the transformative nature of higher education and the significant role it plays in these students’ lives.

Submitting a piece was purely optional, and I expected about a third of the class to put forth something they had written. To my delight, out of 32 students I taught this semester, 23 of them (71%) submitted pieces, some supplying multiple original works. My role in this process was to publicize a call for submissions, collect the works they had written, do some light editing and formatting within Pressbooks, organize the textbook into cohesive parts and chapters, and locate and pair pictures/images with each piece. Once the piece was placed into a chapter, student writers were sent drafts of their work within Pressbooks and were asked to give the final go-ahead.

I hope that you too will appreciate these writers’ authentic, candid, deep, and inspiring stories. Theirs are stories of resilience.

Thank you for reading our text.

Sincerely,

Amy Minervini

Instructor / Humanities

Lewis-Clark State College