Oklahoma Magazine April 2019

Page 30

The State NONPROFIT

Restorative Power of Words By giving them a chance to write creatively, Poetic Justice delivers hope to Oklahoma’s incarcerated women.

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POETIC JUSTICE HOSTS WRITING CLASSES FOR INCARCERATED WOMEN. PHOTOS BY HANS KLEINSCHMIDT

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n 2017, then-Gov. Mary Fallin addressed an audience in Washington about what she called Oklahoma’s “dubious honor.” For decades, the state has led the nation in female incarceration by staggering numbers. That year, 151 per every 100,000 women in the state were in prison – many for drug-related crimes. As the incarceration rate has ballooned in recent years and more women receive lengthy sentences for nonviolent offenses, many female inmates struggle to hold on to hope. Five years ago, a University of Oklahoma graduate student doing research stumbled upon the work of OU Professor Emeritus Susan Sharp regarding the state’s system of female incarceration. “The more I read about Oklahoma’s high rate of incarceration of women, the more I wanted to do

OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE | APRIL 2019

something,” says Ellen Stackable, executive director of Poetic Justice, a nonprofit she helped to establish. “As a writing teacher, I knew the power of writing to change lives, so I started searching for a way to teach writing to incarcerated women.” Soon after, Stackable and Claire Collins, a Tulsa performance artist and poet, started Poetic Justice classes at the Tulsa jail. Poetic Justice, a “restorative writing” workshop lasting 6-8 weeks, focuses as much on hope as it does on composing. Hanna Al-Jibouri, the nonprofit’s president and volunteer coordinator and once one of Stackable’s high school students, describes a typical session. “Class time is about two hours long,” Al-Jibouri says. “Class begins with an icebreaker question. We then have students create their own ground rules for the class to

follow. From there, we do a guided meditation; this allows women to relax after whatever kind of a day they may have had. “We typically then read some exemplar poems … written by incarcerated women from previous Poetic Justice classes and discuss these together. From there, the women create a word palette, similar to a painter’s palette, where we come up with a brainstorm of potential words that may fit into our night’s poetry prompt. “Finally, it is time to write, and surprisingly, this only lasts about 15 minutes out of the entire class. We end class by sharing poetry.” Al-Jibouri says sharing is optional, but most women choose to do so. “Our chant is how we close class, repeating three times: ‘I have a voice, I have hope and I have the power to change.’” Class exercises range from learning and writing in traditional poetic forms, such as haiku and odes, to closure letters and planning for life outside prison. “We call these restorative writing workshops because the actual act of writing only takes up less than 25 percent of class time,” Al-Jibouri says. “We do so much to build com-


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