Appalachian Prison Book Project
Challenging mass incarceration through books, education, and community engagement.
Book clubs are places of gathering and welcoming; analyzing and discussing; writing and dreaming. Attendees read new things, meet new people, and tackle new ideas. These clubs are iconic and mobile, and they can happen anywhere. Even behind bars. From…
An overwhelming and exciting majority of the hundreds of letters we receive each week are directly from incarcerated people in Appalachia, but not all of our correspondence is from the people behind bars. Sometimes, we get letters or emails from…
APBP is taking on our next big challenge: creating and supporting credit-bearing college courses for incarcerated students. And we need your help. Our organization began in 2004 with a handful of books being mailed into prisons. Word spread. More volunteers…
Prison reform has a long and complicated history. Reform is often defined as how people come out of prison “changed” and with a sense of autonomy (or even freedom), while others remain the same as before they went in. Prison…
APBP has been awarded the 2019 Amplifier Award from Barrelhouse Magazine. We are so excited about this partnership that will help us promote writing and artwork by incarcerated people in West Virginia. Special thanks to APBP Student President Rayna Momen who took…
APBP intern Kristin, a student at WVU, and Maruice, an incarcerated artist, worked together to create a drawing that represents many of our organization's core values. A book, to represent education; a key, to represent freedom; mountains, to represent Appalachia;…
We mailed more books to imprisoned people in 2018 than in any previous year -- more than 5,000. Here are the numbers as of October. Thanks to everyone who makes this work possible. We are excited to grow as a…
APBP was recently featured in BuzzFeed News! Read the article, This Appalachian Nonprofit Puts Books in the Hands of Inmates Who Need Them, to learn about how we got started, what we do, and how we do it.
