Across the U.S., various organizations work to ensure that people who are incarcerated have access to literature. These include Books to Prisoners, which originated with a bookstore, and Books Not Bars, a publisher’s program.
Seattle’s Left Bank Books has operated as an anarchist collective since it opened in 1973. An early initiative, Books to Prisoners, has grown into one of the country’s largest prison literacy projects. In 2024, some 27,500 pounds of books went out to prisons in more than 40 states, with the help of local groups that know the rules of individual states and institutions.
Executive director Andy Chan began volunteering with Books to Prisoners in 1994. He says that more than a thousand letters arrive each month from incarcerated people in facilities where library budgets have waned. “If they didn’t need books, they wouldn’t be asking,” he notes. The most requested item is a dictionary, and sci-fi and westerns are popular fiction genres; other wish-list items include GED guides, vocational manuals, and books on small business ownership. Content bans that vary by state and facility can keep incarcerated people from receiving books exploring race and identity, Chan explains, citing a 2022 incident in Tennessee, when a Malcolm X biography was rejected by a correctional facility with a handwritten note that read, “Malcolm X not allowed.”
“Learning brings up questioning, and questioning is not what they want—they want people to do what they’re told to do,” Chan says. “We want people to leave better than when they arrived, and reading books is one of the ways that can happen.”
Dana Blanchard joined Haymarket Books, a radical nonprofit publisher in Chicago, in 2016. As she settled into her new job as publicist, she noticed a stack of requests from incarcerated readers. Staffers took turns mailing out books when they had time, but the volume of requests continued to grow. Eventually, Haymarket streamlined the process, and in 2021, Books Not Bars was born.
Later that year, the publisher released We Do This ’Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, which stoked conversations about justice reform and prison abolition. Blanchard, now Haymarket’s programming coordinator, says the title also helped Books Not Bars connect to organizations like the Mississippi collective Study and Struggle, a political education group she describes as “led by folks who are currently incarcerated.”
Each week, Haymarket’s initiative receives an average of 50 letters at its post office box, many of them requesting books about Black liberation, radical poetry, and political history. Last year, the publisher donated 14,000 books to various causes, and with the help of its annual fundraising campaign, 1,500 of those were earmarked for Books Not Bars.
“We’re about political education for everyone,” Blanchard says. “And everyone includes folks who are currently incarcerated.”
