Zeke Caligiuri on the Incarcerated Writers Who Edited An Anthology on Class
LitHub, November 16, 2023: Zeke Caligiuri on the Incarcerated Writers Who Edited An Anthology on Class
“Writer and editor Zeke Caligiuri joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, a new collection of essays on class he co-edited along with eleven other incarcerated writers. The volume’s contributors include Eula Biss, Kao Kalia Yang, Lacy M. Johnson, Valeria Luisielli, Kiese Laymon, and many others. Caligiuri, who worked on the book while in Minnesota correctional facilities and is now free, discusses the challenges of creativity and the literary life in prison settings, as well as how the book came to be. He also reflects on the idea that ‘the history of class hasn’t always been written by the powerful, but they have always been its editors,’ as he writes in a foreword, which he reads from during the episode.
“Whitney Terrell: I want to rewind a little bit so our listeners can hear about the long road to this book. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got your start as a writer via the Stillwater Writers Collective and later with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop?
“Zeke Caligiuri: I really just got my start as an incarcerated reader. A big thing is that my relationship to books and language has always made me want to be able to write the books that impacted my life in the same way. I sort of began writing my own stories and trying to put together my own life, and I ended up running into a cohort of people when I was incarcerated in Stillwater that were also writers or artists. And a big draw that I always tell folks is that when you’re in those sorts of places, the artists tend to find each other. There can be 1000 people, but the artists tend to find each other. And that was really what the case was. Anytime I was anywhere, I always ended up finding other people who were working on things—creatives. As a result, we also realized that there wasn’t going to be support coming from outside of the facilities. We had sort of all gotten together under the idea that we needed each other as a community for whatever that meant, so that it could grow.
“One really good friend of mine, C. Fausto Cabrera, and I always had a real kind of complicated artist relationship. He was phenomenal with all sorts of different mediums like paint and pastels, and he was also a phenomenal writer. I had this project that I wanted to write—I was writing my memoir at the time—and I was really afraid that they would do something to stop it, they would do something to prevent it from getting out there. So we had these sorts of ideas, like, how are we going to build sort of some collective power? There’s really only so much you can do in there, but it was about trying to create a collective of artists and creatives that would be able to somehow help each other.
“Regardless of what it was, we just knew that we didn’t have outside support, and so we built what we call the Stillwater Writers Collective, which was just the collective of us. We ran it. We did everything it took to take care of each other. Fortunately, what ended up inevitably happening was Jen Bowen coming into the facility. Jen had decided she wanted to teach some writing classes, and she did at one of the other facilities.”
Additional reading:
American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion edited by Zeke Caliguiri on bookshop.org
Electric Lit, October 16, 2023: How a Collective of Incarcerated Writers Published an Anthology From Prison
