By Alex Tretbar and Natalye Childress / Prism Reports
It started with a tweet.
“I won the @PENamerica Prison Writing Contest in 2022 and never received the $250 prize, even after much back and forth via email, which continues to this day. I know of at least one other first place winner who never received their prize money, either,” I wrote on March 17.
As one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious literary organizations, PEN America has more than $25 million in revenue and nearly $46 million in assets. In 2021, the Mellon Foundation granted PEN America $1.5 million to expand its Prison and Justice Writing Program. Yet I spent 20 months after my release from prison chasing down my $250 first-place poetry prize for the 2022 PEN America Prison Writing Contest.
I’m not the only incarcerated writer this has happened to.
I was incarcerated with a friend who also won a Prison Writing Award that he never received payment for. Shortly after I tweeted about my experience, writer and editor Natalye Childress contacted me about an incarcerated friend of hers who’d also never been paid. It seemed remarkable that this happened to multiple people in our small circle, so we began to wonder how many other incarcerated writers never received their prize money from PEN America.
Within five days of my tweet, PEN America used Zelle to send me $300—this was $50 more than what I was owed. I couldn’t help but think of the unknown number of incarcerated writers who don’t have the luxury of repeatedly emailing or posting about their experience on social media. They, too, are prize winners who deserve compensation for their poems, stories, memoirs, essays, and plays.
To put these funds in context, in states like Texas, where incarcerated people aren’t paid for their labor, a $25 prize for honorable mention can be a windfall. And even in states where incarcerated people are compensated for their work, $25 can be more than a month’s worth of pay, enough money to afford luxuries such as coffee or a new pair of shoes. My reference point is the state of Oregon, where I was paid $77.90 per month at one of the highest-paying jobs in the system. The $250 prize PEN America owed me when I was in prison would have amounted to more than three months of labor.
For incarcerated writers whose loved ones want to reach out about prize money on their behalf, it’s not always clear whom they should contact. Since at least last year, PEN America’s Prison and Justice writing program has had a great deal of turnover. The former director and deputy director left just as they were in the midst of rolling out something called the Incarcerated Writers Bureau, which never actually launched. Childress and I decided to email the program manager of the Prison Writing Program, Robert Pollock, in an effort to get her friend the $375 he was owed. I’d been in touch with Pollock while trying to obtain my prize money. Pollock told us that PEN America “tracked down the potential source of the payment issue on our end.”
The money was never sent, and Pollock no longer works for PEN America.
PEN America’s annual Prison Writing Contest has existed for more than 30 years, and we are hard at work identifying other writers who have not been paid, potentially going back to the 1990s. Most of the people Childress contacted were paid, and they had only positive things to say about the program. But as of this month, Childress has identified five winners from 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 who are still missing a total of $925 in payments—a small fortune in prison. One of those prize winners has won three different Prison Writing Awards and hasn’t been compensated for any of them.
PEN America’s malfeasance is especially grievous in a country where slavery is legal in prisons. While many writers do not submit to PEN America’s Prison Writing Contest for the money, it is reprehensible for the organization to promise cash prizes that it fails to distribute.
Childress also identified six additional incarcerated writers who said they were paid, but only after spending months and sometimes even years inquiring about their payments or otherwise having family members and friends call and email on their behalf.
Nonpayment can be a difficult subject to track, given how many incarcerated writers rely on outside proxies to collect payments on their behalf or otherwise handle their financial affairs. But this is necessary work—work that PEN America isn’t doing, despite receiving millions of dollars in funding for its work with incarcerated writers. These writers face censorship, struggle with overwhelming communication barriers, and beat tremendous odds to get their work out into the world. Unfortunately, our efforts to connect with incarcerated writers nationwide have led us to believe that nonpayment isn’t the only serious issue that plagues PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing program.
PEN America is also failing at effectively facilitating its mentorship program. Writers who could connect with their outside mentors experienced long delays in communication. At least five prize winners never heard from their assigned mentors. Some of these incarcerated writers put together large writing samples with their letters, paying to have copies made of their work (an entire novel manuscript, in one case), and purchasing additional postage and larger, more expensive envelopes to send them in, only to never receive a response. Another incarcerated writer sent materials to his mentor, who said the materials never arrived. The writer then paid extra to send a packet with proof of delivery and signature confirmation services. PEN America claimed to never receive the materials, but the writer had a signature proving the packet was delivered. PEN America does offer a $15 stipend to its mentees to cover materials related to mailing costs, but if the organization cannot even efficiently pay its prize winners, we question whether it is capable of actually distributing the stipends.
Based on my wonderful experience with a mentor and Childress’ interviews with incarcerated writers, the fault seems to lie with PEN America, which acts as an intermediary between mentor and mentee. Letters and emails must pass through PEN America staff before reaching their recipients, and it is at this stage that communications appear to slow down or drop off altogether. Many of the incarcerated writers Childress and I spoke with have discussed how demoralizing this experience is.
Richard C. Staton, who won an honorable mention in 2020 for PEN America’s Edward Bunker Prize for Fiction, was never even told his mentor’s name. With PEN America, Staton told us there is “an element of ‘we wanna help you, but not really.’”
PEN America has recently come under fire for “failing to comply with its mission and values with regard to its work on Palestinian free expression.” We have been part of the call to hold the organization accountable for its reckless and dangerous inaction regarding Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. For us, the issue is an intersectional one: PEN gets to wash its hands with the labor of incarcerated writers, thereby laundering its questionable reputation in other sectors. We are speaking out today about the Prison and Justice Writing program because it is crucial to cast light on another example of how PEN America fails and actively harms writers working in perilous conditions.
I owe much of my success as a writer to the exposure and connections that winning a PEN America prize made possible, but I suspect that I am one of the exceptions that prove the rule, considering my education, the wealth of resources and privileges available to me as a white man, and the fact that I am no longer incarcerated. While there are undoubtedly many good actors within the organization, it seems clear that PEN America requires a top-down restructuring if it hopes to ever live up to its mission.
In the meantime, we are calling for PEN America to take the following steps:
- Determine which prize winners have not been paid, and pay them. The burden of proof of payment lies with PEN America, not the prize winners.
- Implement new, more effective means of tracking prize payments to ensure that future winners are compensated in a timely manner.
- Restructure the mentorship program to ensure that mentors and mentees can communicate in a timely manner and in such a way that is not cost-prohibitive to incarcerated writers.
- Provide detailed information regarding how the $1.5 million Mellon Foundation grant was used to support the expansion of the Prison and Justice Writing Program.
If these steps cannot be implemented immediately, we call for a temporary pause of PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing program so that the organization can focus its efforts solely on rectifying its wrongs and ensuring that incarcerated writers will no longer be harmed.
UPDATE 4/17: In an emailed statement to Prism immediately following the publishing of this article, PEN America stated they have created an internal audit system to ensure all payments are sent to writers on time each month, adding that “we are actively working with community partners and foundations who are also grappling with similar structural and systemic challenges around compensating incarcerated artists to brainstorm and possibly co-create a path forward to pay artists inside prison walls in an equitable, timely manner.”
PEN America goes on to state that many prisons prohibit sending payments to incarcerated writers, requiring them to sometimes coordinate payments with family members. In response to complaints by Childress, Tretbar, and other writers, PEN said they are “in the process of paying each of the writers an additional amount of money, plus their original prize amount.”
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