Tenacious: Art & Writings by Women in Prison, no. 34

In the early 2000s, a group of women incarcerated at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Oregon reached out to the writer Victoria Law, a Queens native working as an activist and prison abolitionist. As a teenager, Law had cofounded the New York chapter of the Books Through Bars program, which sends individuals in prison books that spark intellectual curiosity and explore radical writings by activists.

These Oregon women sought an outlet to voice the experiences, frustrations, and inequities they faced in prison, and they needed an ally on the outside to circumvent the prison administration’s censorship. The resulting zine, Tenacious: Art & Writings by Women in Prison, featured poems, essays, art, and letters covering topics that ranged from motherhood to sexual assault to general prison conditions. It eventually included contributions from women across the United States and was published for nearly two decades.