Truthout is proud to announce the winners of the Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize. We are incredibly grateful for the hundreds of essays we received. It was an honor to read every one of them, and we wish we could have selected many more than two.
Our winners are Emile DeWeaver, for “I Was Thrown in Solitary at 14. My Jailers Added a Day Each Time I Fought Back,” and Pinky Shear, for “A Prison Guard Raped Me and Threatened My Life. Now I Fight for Others’ Lives.”
The Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize, awarded to two formerly incarcerated people for essays related to imprisonment or policing, is given in memory of Keeley Schenwar (1990-2020), who was a devoted mother, daughter, sister, friend, writer and advocate for incarcerated mothers. The selected essays share some of the spirit in which Keeley Schenwar moved in the world (and wrote her own work), a spirit of empathy, vulnerability and resistance.
Emile DeWeaver’s essay “I Was Thrown in Solitary at 14. My Jailers Added a Day Each Time I Fought Back” is a close snapshot of the author’s incarceration as a young person resisting injustice through whatever means are available to him. DeWeaver’s precise descriptions of the daily horrors to which he was subjected at the age of 14 represent the brutality of a system that tortures children. The spirit in which he fought against that brutality reminds us that wherever people are oppressed, people are also fighting back.
Pinky Shear’s essay “A Prison Guard Raped Me and Threatened My Life. Now I Fight for Others’ Lives” exposes the horrific sexual violence perpetrated by prison authorities, through the lens of the author’s experience of rape. Shear shares how the pain she endured continues to impact her life — but also how she combats the forces that harmed her, through activism. She co-founded Freedom Overground, a TGNCI/ LGBQA+ prisoner support organization, and her essay communicates how you can take action to challenge the prison-industrial complex, even if you only have a few minutes.
Congratulations, Pinky and Emile!
In addition to our two winners, we are giving a special recognition to EJ, a 6-year-old child who wrote about her experience of her father’s incarceration in “I Want to Start School So I Can Learn to Write Letters to My Dad in Prison.” EJ writes that she is looking forward to learning how to write her dad letters — but what she wants more than anything is for him to come home.
Thank you to every single person who entered this contest. Your stories are a powerful force.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
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We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
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With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy