The 2016 US presidential election pushed Jackie Snow to action: She decided to volunteer for DC Books to Prisons, a nonprofit that sends free books to incarcerated people across the country. For The Los Angeles Review of Books, Snow describes her own literary journey doing this work, and how inmates’ letters opened her up to genres, like romance, that she had previously dismissed. Their correspondence also helped her see that for many people, reading is simply about pleasure and entertainment.
What our incarcerated readers demonstrate is that true literary autonomy isn’t about reading “better” books—it’s about the fundamental right to read freely to pursue pleasure rather than prestige, to seek what speaks to our individual humanity rather than what serves institutional expectations.
Between those expected messages, letters could be anything, turning me into a research librarian. Klingon dictionary requests showed up a few times a year (sometimes rejected because prison officials didn’t want incarcerated Star Trek fans to be able to communicate secretly). Transgender women wrote in a couple of times looking for books on vocal feminization. I had a mom in Kansas send us stamps and a brief letter asking for a book on helping children with ADHD. Requests for what I called the white-power trilogy showed up every so often—books on Norse, Celtic, and Viking history. I tried to give those requests the benefit of the doubt, seeing lots of letters from people trying to connect to their roots in prison, and sent along factual (but often dry) histories.
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