Tell Me What You're Reading #19 Gretchen Primack, poet and advocate, and Visiting Days
While visiting the Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock in the summer of 2018, my daughter Melanie and I met and struck up a conversation with bookseller, author and poet, Gretchen Primack. It turns out that Gretchen is also an educator in a more formal sense. Gretchen has taught and/or administrated with prison education programs (mostly college) in maximum security prisons since 2006.
Gretchen recently released a new book of poems called ”Visiting Days”, which is inspired and informed by her years of first hand experience teaching and administrating in maximum security prisons.
Visiting Days has been described as a collection of short, keen dramatic monologues, a work of advocacy as well as of poetry.
Where to find Gretchen
The Golden Notebook Bookstore, Woodstock, New York
Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison
Visiting Days, by Gretchen Primack
Reviews Blue Stone Press | Albany Poets | The Michigan Daily
Other books referred to -
Solitary, by Albert Woodfox
Reviews The Guardian | The Washington Post
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Reviews The New York Times | The Atlantic | The New York Review of Books | London Review of Books | The New Yorker | National Review | Observer
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
Reviews The New York Times | The Guardian | National Review | Slate
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander
Reviews The New York Times | New Orleans Review
Books for Prisoners
NYC Books Through Bars is an all-volunteer-run group that sends free, donated books to incarcerated people across the nation.
Greenlight Bookstore is partnering with Books Through Bars on providing books from the Books Through Bars Wishlist to people in incarceration
Books to Prisoners Mailing free books to incarcerated individuals since 1973.
