a student newspaper of the university of tulsa
september 8, 2015 issue 1 ~ volume 101
Female inmates empowered by poetry.
Women prisoners in America.
Women prisoners in Oklahoma.
The most incarcerated women of any country in the world
The most incarcerated women of any state in the union.
Ellen Stackable is a local teacher at the Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences (TSAS), a charter high school focusing on a liberal arts education. Stackable has taught at TSAS for fourteen years. Maggie Lane is a junior at TU studying English and education. Both Lane and Stackable teach poetry to women at the David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center every Wednesday night. They have both conducted individual research on the status of incarceration of women in Oklahoma and were interested in expanding their knowledge of the prison system. Stackable co-created a program to teach poetry to women in jail with Claire Collins, a local writer, in order to provide the women with a creative outlet. Natalie Wood Student Writer Natalie Wood: Ellen, how was the program started and what was your initial motivation for joining it? Ellen Stackable: Dan Hahn (a fellow teacher at TSAS) came to school one day and told me about this poetry program at the jail. I thought “What! I’ve been trying to do something at the jail for several years!” I don’t know what motivated me exactly. I think when I
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was working on my Master’s and looking for a topic, I just went down a rabbit trail one day and began looking at the state of incarcerated women in Oklahoma. The more I found out the more upset I got. I had no idea of the medieval nature of some of the practices here, and that Oklahoma incarcerates more women than anyone in the world. So, I started looking for a place where I could teach writing. I tried several different places, and prisons are kind of a labyrinth of a system to figure out. I ended up teaching one summer at a privately run Christian place that allowed women
to go there instead of prison, but it was just a really weird place, so I quit doing it. So when Dan told me about his program, I went to visit with the class that had both men and women teaching it. I asked him if there was anything just for the women and he told me no. That’s when I met Claire Collins and she and I just decided to start it. We had a contact through another woman that allowed us to go to the prison, and it wasn’t long after that that I met Maggie.
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See Poetry, page 6