Freedom Collective, Volume 3, is Now Available
Freedom Collective: Poems from the UCSP Creative Writing Workshop, Spring 2025
The third volume of Freedom Collective is here. This chapbook gathers poetry from thirteen women incarcerated at the California Institution for Women, produced through the Spring 2025 Creative Writing Workshop of the UC Sentencing Project (UCSP). Across its 72 pages, fifteen writers move through themes of longing and confinement, love and betrayal, motherhood and family rupture, addiction and recovery, grief, faith, and the persistent pull toward freedom—both literal and internal.
The UCSP Creative Writing group serves as a portal into the lives and inner worlds of incarcerated women, offering space to tap into an inner muse and self-expression that might otherwise stay dormant. As the writers put it in their introduction, “For us, it creates a diversion that takes us away from both the chaos and the sadness of prison life.”
The workshop was facilitated by Rosie Stockton in partnership with the UC Sentencing Project, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women/Barbra Streisand Center. The zine was designed by Kaya Napachoti, with research support from Jane Dorotik, Mindy Jones, and Ayesha Waraich.
