ABSTRACT
The Readers' Circle, part of the University of Southern California's Prison Education Project, is a volunteer-based editing network that pairs USC students and faculty with incarcerated writers seeking feedback on their creative and non-fiction work. This chapter discusses the Readers' Circle's founding in 2021 and its exponential growth, distinguishing our non-curricular, writer-to-writer model from those of more formalized (e.g., classroom-based) prison-university partnerships. We address the affordances and challenges of running a correspondence-based editing network serving facilities across the United States, and we make an argument for greater administrative investment from universities toward dismantling creative injustice.
