Founding Members

Prison writing is an old and venerated genre with a special place in the canon. From Christian biblical texts by Paul of Tarsus and John of Patmos, to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, writing by incarcerated authors has been shared widely across a variety of mediums and recognized for its contributions to society.

The Life Lines Collective was organized in 2016 as a collaboration between residents of North Carolina’s death row and a couple outsiders. After developing a proof of concept for their project, the group successfully funded a Kickstarter that fall to continue publishing spoken works from incarcerated writers for the next year.