Published writers don’t often rob banks.

This expression, coined by a student at the University of Arizona’s prison creative writing workshops, is the philosophy of UA Poetry Center’s Free Time Writing Contest for Incarcerated Writers.

“If you can find a different way of seeing yourself in the world, through this energy, through the work that you put out in the literary text, it can have a real profound impact on how people might move forward with their lives,” said Tyler Meier, Poetry Center director.

The Free Time Writing Contest will consider submissions postmarked on or before Aug. 15, and is open to any poet, memoirist or storyteller who is currently incarcerated. It is a part of the center’s Free Time: Writers Inside and Out Program, a pen-pal initiative in which community-based volunteer mentors help support and provide feedback to incarcerated writers.

This program sprang forth from the Art for Justice grant project, which allowed the Poetry Center to commission 20 contemporary poets to write about the crisis of incarceration in the United States. While hosting live readings in Tucson, the center wanted incarcerated writers to have access to the work, so it partnered with Flikshop, an app that enables users to send photos to prisons and jails as postcards.
“What we didn’t account for was that people wrote back,” Meier said. “Suddenly we had all these letters from people asking more questions, and that’s how the Free Time program started.”

Free Time is a relatively new addition to a suite of efforts servicing incarcerated communities initiated by Richard Shelton, a pillar of UA’s creative writing department and renowned writer who died in 2022.

In 1970, the then-young professor began corresponding with Charles Schmid — the Tucson serial killer who inspired Joyce Carol Oates’ short story, “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Seeking feedback, Schmid mailed Shelton his own writing. Shelton wrote back.

Shelton’s exchange with Schmid inspired the professor to direct a creative writing workshop with incarcerated individuals in Florence, Arizona that same year. This workshop was the first of many that he would lead over his career.

Lois Shelton, longtime UA Poetry Center director and wife to Richard Shelton, also committed herself to helping incarcerated writers by typing and copyediting their material. The Shelton couple’s work continued for decades. Richard Shelton chronicled the whole story in his 2007 memoir, “Crossing the Yard: 30 Years as a Prison Volunteer.”

“We still continue those connections today,” Meier said. “This is very much an extension of the programs and projects that he started.”

The Poetry Center has continued to support workshops at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Tucson, as well as work with young writers in juvenile detention and publish Rain Shadow Review, a longstanding literary journal founded by Shelton in 1989.

The publication is dedicated to presenting the work of writers who are currently or formerly incarcerated. The first issue, then called “Walking Rain Review,” platformed literary voices like Jimmy Santiago Baca, Michael Hogan and Ken Lamberton, the latter becoming an award-winning author and the managing editor of Rain Shadow Review.
Along with subscriptions to various literary magazines, the winners of the Free Time Writing Contest will be published in the 2025 issue of Rain Shadow Review.

Submissions are evaluated by the journal’s editorial staff and volunteers from the Free Time program.

“They’ve worked with material submitted from incarcerated writers over the many years of it being in publication, so they have the right kind of editorial background and a deep understanding of some of the issues that show up in the work from those communities,” Meier said.

Three winners will be selected, one in each genre: fiction, nonfiction and poetry. The contest saw around 100 submissions in each genre last year, Meier approximated, with interest pouring in from prisons and jails around the nation.
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They’re looking for the most compelling work,” Meier said. “There’s no prescription for content that has to be about something in particular. They’re really looking for writers that have spent some time polishing and are doing work that rises to the top out of a pool of submissions.”

Last year’s winning pieces included:

Nonfiction: “The Death of Big Piney” by Gordon Grilz, an elegiac and self-reflective commemoration of a favorite tree.

Fiction: “The Curious Incident of the Polka-Dotted Turtles” by Michael John Wiese, a coming-of-age story of trauma, triumph, and young love.

Poetry: “What I am meant for” by Van McGowan, a three-stanza pondering of purpose.

“All of the submissions are amazing,” Meier said. “The people who are writing are often writing under terrible conditions, in a system that is not designed to value them very much or at all.”

“Through this work, whether they’re poems or stories or memoirs, we see time and time again that this has a profound impact on people who have been told by the system that they aren’t worth much. I think if people can see themselves as writers, they can start to see themselves in other ways.”

This article appears in 06-19-2025.