Books Through Bars Book Event

About the Event:

Join for a book with Dave Mac Marquis celebrating Books Through Bars. Dave will give book talk that gives us insight on the Pr*son Book Movement. We invite the community to join the conversation and learn with us on Wednesday June 26th at 6pm in our bookstore. Books are avaible in tickets and at the bookstore before and on the day of the event.

Books through Bars powerfully conveys an important public statement about the importance of books and their value to maintaining one's full humanity through the life of the mind. -Doran Larson / author of Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (1/9/2024)

About the book:

People organizing Pr*son books programs have quietly gathered in basements, storage spaces, and the back rooms of secondhand bookstores for the last seventy years, reading letters written by incarcerated people and sending books in return. This diffuse and nonhierarchical movement operates on shoestring budgets with donated libraries in thirty states, and yet, there is little awareness of this long-standing social movement.
This book contains essays that explain the need for Pr*son book programs and offer advice on how to establish or become involved with Pr*son books programs, as well as shedding light on current challenges. While mass incarceration can make people feel powerless, this book details how ordinary people can organize and intervene in the largest imprisonment the world has ever known. The editors of this book hope it will inspire more people to realize that everyone has the power to treat each other differently and to foster a culture of care over cruelty.

About the Editor

Dave “Mac” Marquis is a Founding Documents Postdoctoral Fellow. He joined the department in 2022 after earning his PhD from the College of William & Mary. Mac is the Book Review Editor for H-Labor, the Executive Assistant for the Labor and Working Class History Association and a former board member of the Southern Labor Studies Association. His work has primarily been focused on the timber industry of the South during Jim Crow and lies at the intersection of Labor, Environmental, and African American History. He is the co-editor of Books Through Bars: Stories from the Pr*son Books Movement (University of Georgia Press: Spring 2023) which will be the first edited volume to examine the origins and activities of this nation-wide social movement. He also has a graphic history in progress, Solidarity in the Jim Crow Piney Woods: A Graphic History of The Brotherhood of Timber Workers, 1910-1916 (The Historic New Orleans Collection) which details the history and legacy of one of the largest interracial unions in the Deep South during Jim Crow.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Source Booksellers, 4240 Cass Avenue, Detroit, United States