Tuturro, Bogosian & More Set for 'Breakout: Voices From Inside' Event with PEN Prison Writing Program, 11/9

On Monday, November 9, WNYC Radio's The Jerome L Green Performance Space's month dialogue series, 'The NEXT New York Conversation' will host Lemon Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Mary Gaitskill, Jamal Joseph, and John Turturro in a special conversation event entitled 'Breakout: Voices From the Inside.' 

'The NEXT New York Conversation' showcases winning manuscripts from PEN's Prison Writing Contest, read by established writers, actors, performers, and poets.  These industry professionals will also read from the diaries that individuals have written as part of PEN's partnership program with the Anne Frank Center, USA. The event will be streamed live as video webcast at www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace.

Tickets for the event are $50 and $75, and can be purchased by visiting www.pen.org. Proceeds will benefit PEN's Prison Writing Program. 

Founded in 1971, the PEN Prison Writing Program believes in the restorative and rehabilitative power of writing, by providing hundreds of inmates across the country with skilled writing teachers and audiences for their work. The program seeks to provide a place for inmates to express themselves freely with paper and pen and to encourage the use of the written word as a legitimate form of power. The program sponsors an annual writing contest, publishes a free handbook for prisoners, provides one-on-one mentoring to inmates whose writing shows merit or promise, conducts workshops for former inmates, and seeks to get inmates' work to the public through literary publications and readings.Every year hundreds of inmates from around the country submit poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic plays to PEN's Prison Writing Contest, one of the few outlets of free expression for the country's incarcerated. Manuscripts come to us in many forms: handwritten, typed, and written in the margins of legal documents.