Pittsburgh 'Banned Books Week' event features incarcerated writer

Challenges to library books have been much in the news in recent years, and with good reason. The American Library Association reports that despite year-to-year variations, “documented attempts to censor books continues to far exceed the numbers prior to 2020.”

But as highlighted by a Mon., Sept. 30, event at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s main branch, book restrictions aren’t limited to schools and public libraries.

“Book Bannings in Prison: The Fight Against Censorship” — which falls just after Banned Books Week — features Stevie Wilson, an incarcerated writer and activist who said, “Banned Books Week is every week for imprisoned people.”  

The event, organized by Carnegie Mellon University educators, is built around a pre-recorded online video interview of Wilson by Moira Marquis, senior manager of free-expression advocacy group PEN America’s Freewrite Project. Wilson also plans to phone in for a brief question-and-answer session.

“Carceral censorship is the most pervasive form of censorship in the United States,” wrote Marquis and Juliana Luna in PEN America’s 2023 report “Reading Between the Bars.”

“Every single week, we go through censorship, we have these battles with the department of corrections across the country, 52 different jurisdictions that we have to fight in order to get things to read,” Wilson told WESA in a recent phone interview.  

Wilson, who grew up in Philadelphia, is about 15 years into a maximum 16-year sentence for charges stemming from a sexual assault. He’s currently incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution - Dallas, in Luzerne County. He’s written about prison conditions for online publications including Jewish Currents, The Marshall Project, and Inquest, a publication devoted to decarceration.

While inmates at state prisons have access to prison libraries, rules governing what other materials they can receive are complex. Pennsylvania state prisons require all publications to be sent to a central processing center before they reach inmates. The materials can be purchased and shipped only through publishers, bookstores, online distributors and other “original source vendors,” and not from individual addresses.

Materials can be withheld from inmates if they contain “obscene” or “explicit sexual material” or raise “security issues.”

Wilson contends these rules are applied broadly, even arbitrarily.

Moira Marquis

“At one point in time, any time I got a book that said anything about Black Panthers, they just said it was banned, completely,” he said. “They said the Black Panthers were a security threat group. I didn’t understand that because the Black Panthers have been disbanded since 1982.” Materials about what he called “the Black freedom struggle” have also been withheld, he said.

“There was a book called ‘The Revolution Starts at Home,’ and this is a book about intimate-partner violence and how we can stop it,” he added. “They said I couldn’t have it, and all they were looking at was the title that said ‘revolution.’ … They never looked at the content.”

County jails have their own policies. The Allegheny County Jail has periodically been criticized for rules governing how books reach prisoners there.

Wilson said many of the restrictions inside prisons mirror challenges outside.

“We see the same types of people, people of color, queer and trans folk, materials that talk about their lives, their histories, these books are being attacked,” he said. “This is the same thing that is happening behind the walls.”

On a spreadsheet linked on the Department of Corrections website, publications listed as “denied” include “Art and Power of Letter Writing for Prisoners,” “Art and Queer Culture,” “Forming Your Own Limited Liability Company,” “Legal Forms for Starting and Running Your Own Business” and selected issues of “Interview” magazine.

Prisoners can appeal books that are denied approval. Wilson said he’s often filed appeals.

“If they ban a book and I don’t appeal it, that book becomes banned for everybody in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections now,” he said. “So I have to appeal these confiscations or everyone loses.”

Carnegie Mellon English professor Kathleen Newman is one of the CMU educators who organized the event, which grew partly out of a course on Banned Books she’s taught nearly every fall for two decades. With the event, she said, “What I’m really hoping for is just a basic education in what incarcerated people are facing when they want to avail themselves of knowledge and education.”

“If we don’t get reading materials to people inside, then how are they going to learn, how are they going to grow,” said Wilson. “How are they going to change and transform?”

The event runs 6-7 p.m. More information is here.