Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor in conversation

Nigel Poor is a visual artist whose work explores the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. Her work has been shown at San Jose Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose; Friends of Photography; SF Camerawork; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Her work is in the collections of the SFMOMA, the M.H. deYoung Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Corcoran Gallery of Art. Poor received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and is a professor of photography at CSU Sacramento. In 2011, Poor got involved with San Quentin State Prison as a volunteer teacher for the Prison University Project. In 2013 she started working with a group of incarcerated men producing audio stories and in 2015 she cocreated the prison-based podcast Ear Hustle.

Earlonne Woods is the cocreator, coproducer, and cohost of the Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle. On his release from San Quentin State Prison, Woods was hired full time to continue the work started inside but also adding reentry stories. He is also involved in the Repeal California’s Three Strike Coalition, which aims to end California’s draconian three strikes law.

Tiyi M. Morris is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University at Newark and the cofounder and codirector of the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project. She is a civil rights historian who studies Black women’s social and political activism. Teaching in African American and African Studies, a discipline that emerged from social justice movements, her curricula underscore the need to create a more just and equitable society. Dr. Morris believes her role as an educator is to help dismantle systems of oppression by liberating the minds of students and empowering them to challenge the oppressions they face and/or perpetuate. She began teaching at Franklin Medical Center in 2019 to support the discipline’s mission to connect the community to the campus and actualize a philosophy of education as the practice of freedom. She views her teaching in correctional institutions as a way to connect theory and practice and to engage in the community work that makes our intellectual endeavors relevant to the larger Black community and society as a whole.

Mary Thomas is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the cofounder and codirector of the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project. She also serves as a director for the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme project Livable Futures. Trained as a feminist geographer, her research examines how youth in the US come to understand themselves and their identities in and through institutional spaces like schools and detention facilities. Her published work shows that while youth must expend vast energy negotiating adultist institutional structures that demand behavioral conformity, they alone shoulder the repercussions when they fail to meet expectations that are grounded in stereotypes, norms, and demands for idealized bodies. In collaboration with Dr. Tiyi Morris, she is working to expand Ohio State’s commitment to prison-based education. She has spent time as a volunteer at juvenile detention facilities in central Ohio with incarcerated girls and as a higher education volunteer at the Marion Correctional Institution through the nonprofit organization, Healing Broken Circles.