Here are the recipients of the 2026 Writing Freedom Fellowship.

In 2024, Haymarket Books, along with the Mellon Foundation, launched a new fellowship aimed at supporting and uplifting writers impacted by the criminal legal system: The Writing Freedom Fellowship. Today, they’ve announced their third annual cohort of fellows, twenty writers whose work “confronts and illuminates themes ranging from lineage and loss to militarism, migration, and life on death row” and “challenges existing narratives about system-impacted lives while imagining more just futures ahead.” The fellowship, which includes professional support, education, and an award, is “designed to encourage community among writers, to foster their creative practices, and to bring their essential voices and perspectives to broader audiences.”

“Writing Freedom is recognition and growth and community and, now, lineage,” said 2025 Writing Freedom Fellow B Batchelor in a statement. “It is the best thing to ever happen for my writing, for the marginalized and oft-silenced community I represent, and for the verdant path ahead.”

“The community of writers we are championing grows with the recognition of these tremendous writers. Haymarket Books is proud to continue elevating their necessary work,” said Jyothi Natarajan, Program Director at Haymarket Books, in a statement. “With the dramatic expansion of the carceral state, the work of Writing Freedom couldn’t be more urgent.”

The 2026 Writing Freedom Fellows were selected by panel comprised of Jaquira Diáz, Safia Elhillo, Luis J. Rodriguez, Sarah Schulman, and Jenisha Watts. Congratulations to all this year’s fellows:

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, memoirist, and essayist. His next memoir, Off the Cuff, will be released by W.W. Norton. Betts has earned multiple fellowships, including one from the MacArthur Foundation. He is the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads.

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator. An NY Emmy, NAACP, and Audie award finalist, Browne is a 2022 Kennedy Center Next 50 fellow and inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center. Her collection Chrome Valley won the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her YA novel was longlisted for the National Book Award. She holds an honorary doctorate from Marymount College.

Demetrius “Meech” Buckley, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is published in The Rumpus, The Yale Review, the Marshall Project’s Life Inside, and Prism. His essay “Death Around Da Corner” won Editor’s Choice Selection in CRAFT’s 2024 essay contest. His collection Here Is Home won Cave Canem’s 2021 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize. Buckley edits Apogee’s Freedom Meridian.

Jill Damatac, a writer and a filmmaker, is the author of Dirty Kitchen, a food memoir of growing up undocumented. Born in Manila, Philippines, in the final years of the Marcos dictatorship, Damatac immigrated to the United States as a child.

Barbara Fant is the author of three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Joy in the Belly of a Riot. A native of Ohio, she is a Healing Centered Engagement specialist who believes in the healing power of the arts.

Benjamin Frandsen is a poet, essayist, and advocate whose writing on incarceration, redemption, and resilience appears in exCHANGE magazine, Iconoclast, PEN America’s prison writing anthologies, UCLA Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and other outlets. As founder/executive director of the Ben Free Project, he hosts the Ben Free Podcast and teaches in California prisons.

Kennedy Amenya Gisege is a Kenyan visual artist and the author of the book Twenty-One Birthdays from Lost Kite Editions. He believes his village Ibacho gave the world a lot of good things, but he wants to be the best thing that came from there.

Sheree L. Greer is a Black lesbian writer and founder of Kitchen Table Literary Arts in Tampa, Florida. Published widely, Greer holds fellowships from VONA/VOICES, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Yaddo, Ragdale, and Lost and Found Lab. Her award-winning nonfiction has been named in Best American Essays.

Randall Horton is the recipient of two American Book Awards. His latest memoir, Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays, is published by Northwestern University Press. Horton is a professor of English at the University of New Haven.

Donny Jackson is a lifelong poet, a doctor of clinical psychology, and a documentary television producer. Jackson was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2021, Kirkus Reviews named his poetry collection, boy, one of the “Best Indie Books of the Year.” Jackson currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Lyle C. May is a journalist and author of Witness: An Insider’s Narrative of the Carceral State. His writing appears in numerous publications and law journals. When not writing, May frequently lectures on the politics and policies of mass incarceration for university classes, academic conferences, and online events.

Saretta Morgan is the author of the poetry collection Alt-Nature. Her work is informed by lived practices at the intersections of grassroots social and environmental justice movements, and by personal and intergenerational experiences of incarceration and land stewardship.

Jassmine Parks is a Detroit-born poet and multidisciplinary artist. Her work has appeared in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Detroit MetroTimes, Clearline Magazine, among others. She has received fellowship support from the Watering Hole, Torch Literary Arts, PEN America, Vermont Studio Center, and Kresge Arts in Detroit.

Alan Pelaez Lopez, born in Mexico, is a Black Zapotec writer based in Oakland, California. Their creative writing and theoretical work takes up forced migration, incarceration, solitary confinement, and crip futures. Following Indigenous linguistic activism, they write against vanishment.

Karisma Price is the author of I’m Always So Serious, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick. She is a 2025 Whiting Award winner and holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Tulane University.

Adam Roberts is a memoirist and essayist from Long Island who spent twenty-six years incarcerated in New York State. Released in October 2025, he writes about survival, transformation, and the human cost of mass incarceration. His work has appeared in the Marshall Project’s Life Inside, Hyperallergic, and the Vera Institute of Justice’s News & Stories.

Watani Stiner is a memoirist and former Black Power activist whose writing explores revolution, exile, captivity, and reconciliation with family and history. He is the author of To Stumble Is Not to Fall: A Revolutionary’s Journey from United States’ Injustice and lives in Oakland, California, where he continues writing and mentoring younger voices.

Derek R. Trumbo Sr., an essayist and playwright, is a multi-time PEN Prison Writing Award winner. Creator of the series “Never Eat the Candy on Your Pillow: A Commonsense Guide to Prison,” published by Prism, Trumbo is currently polishing his short story collection Palpable Prisons. He mentors, instructs, and facilitates writing circles with currently incarcerated writers.

Marco Verdoni is an MFA graduate of the New Writers Project and a Fulbright scholar from Saginaw, Michigan. His award-winning work has appeared in Fourth Genre and Akashic Books’ Prison Noir anthology.

Bernardo Wade serves as assistant editor and poetry editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He is a Wallace Stegner fellow and has published his poems in The Nation, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is infatuated with Ed Roberson’s question, “Can you O.D. on life?”