Frank “Ken” Kensaku Saragosa

Frank “Ken” Kensaku Saragosa writes about homelessness, addiction, criminality, and incarceration. He won the PEN America Prison Writing Awards in Fiction and Nonfiction Essay and was a 2023 LAMBDA Literary Foundation Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2024 Anaphora Arts Fellow. Ken is a founding member of the San Diego Unhoused Collective, which won a Columbia University Assembling Voices Fellowship to develop a play about life on the streets of San Diego devised from interviews with those who, like him, experience(d) homelessness.

Writing Project: His novel, in.pieces, consists of a series of prose poems in an experimental anti-narrative structure exploring communities of people who live unsheltered on the streets of downtown San Diego. 

Jacqueline Herron

Jacqueline Herron is a writer based in San Diego. Her essay, “Last Day,” was published in the Fall 2023 issue of Air/Light Magazine. Jacqueline graduated with honors from Pepperdine University with a master’s degree in clinical psychology and earned her bachelor’s degree from University of California, Santa Cruz.

Writing Project: Her memoir is about how she survived more than four years in state prison by writing long letters home, creating bespoke affirmations, and developing a state of positive thinking that bordered on delusion. She provides an inside look at incarceration from the perspective of a highly sensitive person with no street smarts… who becomes tougher but also causes the people around her to become softer.

Because it wasn’t safe for her to keep a journal at the beginning, this memoir is based on handwritten letters to her mother during the first 37 days in county jail and the following four months at the notorious California Correctional Women’s Facility (aka “Chowchilla”) state prison. It is a humorous and cringy collection of prison stories about misunderstandings, close calls, and friendship… written by a therapist as she faces her own issues and attempts to heal herself of anxiety, shame, and the grief of losing everything she once thought defined her.

Janetta Johnson

Janetta Johnson has been organizing around the intersections of violence faced by trans and gender non-conforming communities of color. Mentored and deeply influenced by Miss Major, she is honored to have accepted Miss Major’s former position as executive director of the TGI Justice Project.

Writing Project: Her memoir offers a unique recipe for how to survive this world as a black trans woman by transforming negative life experiences toward one’s healing journey. She takes readers on a journey from train tracks to prison yards to flower fields, from Florida’s Bay Area to the San Francisco Bay Area, in the hopes of helping others find the courage to figure out their own recipe of healing.

Niki Martinez

Niki Martinez is a social justice leader whose work is fueled by her experience being incarcerated for 25 years in state institutions. While incarcerated, she became a certified drug and alcohol counselor as well as the co-founder and director of an organization providing policy advocacy for those in the juvenile legal system. Since her release in March 2019, she has been involved in the Credible Messenger Movement working with system-impacted and formerly incarcerated people. As the deputy director of Sister Warriors, Niki is working toward healthy and humane alternatives to the carceral system.

Writing Project: Her memoir delves into her journey through the prison industrial complex, leadership, humility, self-awareness, sexuality, and the power of forgiveness, amends, redemption, and manifestation.

Phal Sok

Phal Sok is a community leader who has served on numerous committees including the California Violence Intervention and Prevention program, where he helped distribute $30 million in state funding, and the first Community Advisory Board to University of Southern California’s School of Social Work. Incarcerated at age 17, he was handed over to immigration enforcement on the date he was scheduled for release, 16 and a half years later. In 2018 he received a pardon from the California state governor. He has been published in the UCLA Law Review.

Writing Project: His nonfiction book will focus on “crimmigration”—the intersection of the criminal and immigration systems in the US, incorporating his own history within the racist history behind the American immigration system.

Romarilyn Ralston

Romarilyn Ralston is the senior director of the Justice Education Center for Claremont Colleges and the former director of Project Rebound at California State Fullerton. After serving 23 years in prison, she earned a bachelor’s degree in gender and feminist studies from Pitzer College and a master’s degree in liberal arts from Washington University in St. Louis. She has received the Napier Fellowship for Peace and Justice, Pitzer College’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and recognitions from the California Legislature, among others. Access to higher education has fueled her commitment to helping others discover the transformative power of postsecondary education and community accountability.

Writing Project: Her memoir, Monsters and Matriarchs: Surviving the Carceral State, offers a deeply personal and poignant glimpse into the human experience during incarceration.

Sylvia Chan

Sylvia Chan is an amputee-cyborg writer, educator, and activist who has taught in foster care, domestic violence, and prison communities. Her debut poetry collection is titled We Remain Traditional (2018), and her essays appear in The Rumpus, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, The Cincinnati Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Tucson, where she works with foster youth.

Writing Project: She is writing two books, a memoir and a poetry collection, both about growing up in juvenile detention and in California’s children’s shelters, group homes, confinements, and camps.

Timothy Long

Timothy Long is an African American returned citizen, son, brother, uncle, and lifelong learner. He was raised in Detroit but grew up behind the walls of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Writing Project: His memoir details growing up in the inner city and the traumas that led to his incarceration; the failed systems that should’ve been in place to step in; his 25+ years of incarceration; the trials of being a teen in an adult facility; and the process of change that culminated in his freedom.

Tracy McCarter

Tracy McCarter is a mom to four amazing humans and two dogs, a grandmother, a nurse, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a lifetime member of Girl Scouts USA. She recently completed her master’s degree in nursing at Columbia University while simultaneously fighting for her freedom with the help of the “I Stand With Tracy” solidarity movement.

Writing Project: Her memoir focuses on her prosecution for the murder of her abusive, estranged husband and explores the question: What does it take to get one innocent Black woman free?

Watani Stiner

Watani Stiner and his brother were sentenced to life in prison in 1969 for involvement in a shootout between the Black Power revolutionary groups. Five years later, he escaped from San Quentin and fled to South America, where he lived in exile for 20 years. In 1994, concerned for the safety and welfare of his children, Watani voluntarily walked into the US Embassy in Suriname and negotiated his surrender. He was finally released in 2015, more than 45 years since he was originally sent to prison. He has been called a revolutionary elder, a storyteller, COINTELPRO survivor, and a social justice advocate passing the historical baton on to the next generation.

Writing Project: His nonfiction book, To Stumble Is Not to Fall: A Revolutionary’s Quest for Justice and Generational Healing, intertwines personal experiences with historical events such as the Black Power movement and COINTELPRO.