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Prison Writing Workshop
» College of Humanities and Sciences
In the summer of 2006, David Coogan started a writing workshop in autobiography at the Richmond City Jail. The purpose was — and still is — to teach offenders how to invent new scripts for living crime and drug free.
Coogan began working with ex-offenders in the fall of 2005 when several of his students in a research writing service-learning course volunteered at Offender Aid and Restoration, a nonprofit with offices in downtown Richmond and the City Jail. On a voluntary basis, Coogan met with the men each week to share drafts of their life stories, with an eye toward eventually publishing a book. By the spring of 2007, he had met roughly four dozen men, but only 12 kept up their writing and consistent communication through their transfers to prison and, for some, their releases. Today, many have completed their chapter-length autobiographies and six have been released. Coogan has written a book proposal and is actively seeking a publisher.
In 2006, he launched a prison writing course for VCU students, which he has taught three times and is offering this semester. In this course, students not only read the published literature of prisoners and ex-offenders, but also read the drafts-in-progress of the men in Coogan’s workshop, at times taking turns typing these up. In class, the students also meet the men in the project who have been released, and out of class they have toured the city jail.
The Prison Writing Workshop is well established as an outreach effort in the community, a teaching program for VCU students and a research project for Coogan.
Get involved
To support this program or get involved as a volunteer, contact David Coogan at dcoogan@vcu.edu.