Virtual! An Evening with American Precariat

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Fifteen essays coedited by a collective of award-winning incarcerated writers, featuring contributions from Lacy M. Johnson, Kiese Laymon, Valeria Luiselli, Kao Kalia Yang, and more, with a foreword by Zeke Caligiuri and an introduction by Eula Biss.

"This is a volume edited by the imprisoned, because the history of class has always been written by the powerful."

This groundbreaking anthology of essays edited by incarcerated writers takes a sharp look at the complexity and fluidity of class and caste systems in the United States. Featuring accounts that include gig work as a delivery driver, homelessness among trans youth, and life with immense student loan debt, in addition to transcripts of insightful discussions between the editors, American Precariat demonstrates how various and often invisible extreme instability can be. With the understanding that widespread recognition of collective precarity is an urgent concern, the anthology situates each individual portrait within societal structures of exclusion, scarcity, and criminality.

These essays write through the silence around class to enumerate the risks that our material conditions leave us no choice but to take. A rendering of the present moment told from below, American Precariat shares stories of the unseen and the unspoken and articulates the lines of our division. In doing so, it offers healing for some of the world's fractures.

C. Fausto Cabrera (he/him) is a writer of poetry and prose incarcerated from 2003–2024. Born in Rockford, Illinois, and raised in Minnesota, Cabrera’s writing explores depression, the diaspora of “mutts,” restorative justice, the desire to be seen in the context of the attention economy, and the right to be an artist, among other threads. He co-authoredThe Parameters of Our Cage (Mack Books, 2020), an epistle collaboration with photographer Alec Soth, and coedited American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023). He was awarded the inaugural 2024 Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket Books.

Zeke Caligiuri (he/they) is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis who received the inaugural 2024 Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket Books. He is the author of This is Where I Am, a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Caligiuri is the cofounder of the Stillwater Writers Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country. Impacted by over two decades of incarceration, he now does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center to help build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition, empowering system-impacted people and reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.

Fong Lee (he/him) is an artist and storyteller based in Saint Paul, MN. He is a celebrated poet, with publications through the Minnesota Pr*son Writing Workshop and Asian American Writers Workshop, and an accomplished painter and photographer. He is a restorative justice practitioner and works for All Square, a nonprofit social enterprise that invests in people impacted by mass incarceration. Fong and his family immigrated to the U.S. as Hmong refugees when Fong was a child, after his family was displaced from their borrowed homeland in Laos.

Lauren Markham (she/her) is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, andVQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders & Belonging.

Kao Kalia Yang (she/her) is an award-winning Hmong American author of books for children and adults whose work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

Moderator Michael Kleber-Diggs (he/him) is an award-winning poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021) was awarded the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, and is the 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature. He is an instructor with the Minnesota Pr*son Writing Workshop, and his memoir, My Weight in Water, is forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau in 2025.

MPWW was founded in 2011 with a single creative writing class at Lino Lakes Pr*son. Since then, they’ve grown into an organization of over 25 instructors who have taught more than 250 creative writing classes to over 3,000 men and women in every adult state Pr*son in Minnesota. They are now the largest and most enduring Pr*son-based literary organization in the country.

MPWW fosters literary community and a devotion to art inside Minnesota correctional facilities through high-quality creative writing classes and related programming. During incarceration and throughout reentry, MPWW empowers writers, challenges stereotypes about the incarcerated population, and promotes a vision of rehabilitation and restorative justice through art. They also seek to bridge the divide between literary communities inside and outside of Pr*son by creating platforms for students’ work. Learn more about classes and other programs here.

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