Our History
NPEP acknowledges with pride the programs and individuals who brought education into Nevada prisons long before we began our work. The Razor Wire Poetry Workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center begun by Shaun Griffin 30 years ago is a wonderful example of that work.
The Poetry Workshop
In 1989 I walked into Northern Nevada Correctional Center. I was young, pea-green, and had never taught inside. Thirty years later Covid came, and I had to stop teaching the Razor Wire poetry workshop. In that time hundreds of men came into the workshop--that sacred hour-and-a-half we sat in the chapel and read and wrote poetry.
They learned from poets across time and culture. They learned however they could. Some did not write well, nor read, but in time, the guys who had been in the workshop began to teach them-- "This is what a strong line looks like. Delete that, write more here, stop the bluster, no one cares." They became their own best teachers.
But the workshop was really a foil for learning to care again. For themselves. Without some hint of their humanity, they could never return to the "outside world" and have a prayer of succeeding. What I really did in those three decades was recreate what little trust had been lost in their lives. I tried to show them how people reacted when things were problematic--with compassion, not anger, with tolerance, not vehemence. I tried to have a relationship with the men, first and foremost. This was not wanted on the yard, and it took the men years to understand I was not bullshitting them when I said, "I'm not here for my health. I'm here because I want you to stay out of prison."
And most have. I am friends with them, and they live throughout the country, the globe. They have lives, spouses, jobs, something to care about. And most, paradoxically, don't write or paint because staying alive is a full-time job. But they are out and that is the final couplet in the long poem that is the Razor Wire Poetry Workshop.
Shaun T. Griffin (2023)
Pictured Above: Prize-winning author and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, Kiese Laymon (center), joins three Razor Wire Poetry Workshop graduates, Durrell Grier, Ismael Santillanes, and Cornell Wilkins, and Dr. Karen Gedney, author of Thirty Years Behind Bars: Trials of a Prison Doctor, at the 2022 Nevada Humanities Lit Crawl.