Poetic Responses to Prisons and Policing (SAMLA Panel #19707)

In Assata: An Autobiography, Assata Shakur blends poetry and narrative to document her experiences growing up in racially divided America; joining the Black Liberation Army; being captured, incarcerated, and brutalized by the state; and escaping to Cuba where she experienced asylum until her recent death. The poems in her book often grapple with the fact that the prison—a space shaped by violence—can also generate radical community, understanding, and a love ethic that echoes an abolitionist vision: “…love is an acid / that eats away bars” (130). Aligning with the conference’s theme of “Hospitality,” this panel will interrogate the capacious and complex dynamics of the prison system and police state through examinations of poetry/poetics. While prisons are infamously inhospitable spaces of isolation, harm, and violence, many poets offer nuanced visions for their experiences and survival. In a 2022 interview with the Prison Journalism Project, poet Reginald Dwayne Betts calls for similar poetic grappling: “We know very little about what it means to live in prison. So we focus often on the violence of incarceration, on the sorrow of incarceration. There’s very little work done on the glimpses of joy.” This panel invites proposals on poetics and poetry responding to prisons and policing. How can state violence and incarceration be recorded, resisted, and/or reimagined? How does poetry offer perspectives on prisons and policing that other genres might overlook? How might poetry offer lenses into the complexities of life within prisons and detention centers that counter mainstream and/or dominant narratives? How might abolitionist poetics be theorized in a contemporary moment?

The organizer of this SAMLA session welcomes proposals for papers analyzing poetic responses to prison and policing, broadly defined. Suggested (but not exhaustive) topics include:

• Abolition poetics
• Poetry by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers
• Poetic protests of the prison industrial complex
• Poetry and the radical imagination/radical tradition
• Poetic responses to immigration detention and ICE enforcement
• Protest poetry
• (In)Hospitality in Prison Poetry

Convention dates: November 5-7, 2026, Atlanta, GA.

Please submit proposals of approximately 250 words by August 24 through the SAMLA Ballast portal: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19707. For questions regarding this panel, please email Allison Serraes at allisonserraes@creighton.edu.