At the reception, Jenny Stasio ’07 will talk about her work with incarcerated women through her position with Family Crisis Services and its Incarcerated Women’s Program.

Recognizing the statistical connection between female incarceration and domestic abuse, the program offers support groups for women at the Cumberland County Jail (Portland) and the Maine Correctional Center (Windham), one of only a handful of such programs offered by U.S. domestic violence agencies.

In 2007, the program added creative writing activities to its educational groups. The women began each creative writing session by reading author Natalie Goldberg’s tips for writers in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within:

1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don’t cross out.
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
6. Go for the jugular.

The majority of the work in the exhibition was done within 15-minute free-writing sessions.

To create the photographic portraits for More Than a Rap Sheet, Family Crisis Services worked with the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Salt alum Christine Heinz, who photographed the women.

Donations of non-spiral-bound notebooks or composition books are greatly appreciated. They are always needed for the project’s ongoing work.

Sponsored by the English department, the Emily Carroll Carleton Lecture at Bates is open to the public at no cost. A reception will follow.

Smith’s lecture at Bates is titled after his book The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009), which gives special attention to an inmate’s figurative passage from civil death to a secular rebirth.

Smith is an assistant professor of English at Yale University. His teaching interests range from American, African and Native American literature to law, historicism, prison studies and the critique of power.

“I am interested in how literary texts of various genres have involved themselves with such problems as punishment, secular justice, human rights and legal personhood,” Smith writes in his Yale bio.

Smith is working on his second book, which explores the public culture of justice in the Revolutionary and antebellum periods. The book considers legal, religious and literary texts in which speakers call upon a higher law as a source of their authority. Smith argues that such invocations enacted new ways of summoning public power in the era of print and popular sovereignty.

The Emily Carroll Carleton Lecture is funded by the King Family Charitable Lead Trust in honor of Emily Carroll Carleton ’99.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, writer, professor of geography and director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, will give a presentation titled The Prison Industrial Complex After 25 Years at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The public is invited to attend the 2007 Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture, sponsored by the chaplain’s office, free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

A founding member of Critical Resistance, an important national anti-prison organization in the United States, Gilmore is active in the Prison Moratorium Project and California Prison Focus. Her new book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Occupation in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), analyzes the economic and political changes that led to California’s prison-building boom. She examines the emergence of movements working to dismantle what she calls the prison industrial complex, highlighting the ways community-based activism has been successful in bridging urban-rural, racial and other divides to achieve victories against the growing prison system.

Gilmore received her doctorate from Rutgers University. A widely published author, her interests include race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, politics and culture, California, North America and the African Diaspora. Gilmore says, “I became a geographer to engage with questions of how we make the world and ourselves, and to study how everyday people do so with the dream of justice, equality, and beauty for all.”

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews ’40, established the lectureship.