Window Inside: A Folio of Writing by Incarcerated Writers
Dear reader,
The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, with nearly two million people currently locked up, not including the thousands of individuals held indefinitely in ICE detention centers or the hundreds recently sent to CECOT in El Salvador without the due process promised by the U.S. constitution. In terms of per capita incarceration rates, the U.S. is exceeded only by Turkmenistan, Rwanda, Cuba, and El Salvador. Yet the U.S. remains one of the wealthiest—if not the wealthiest, depending on which metrics are used—countries in the world. What’s wrong with this picture?
In blunt terms, this country tends to treat prison as a (highly profitable) panacea. This panacea tends to exacerbate the problems it purports to solve while creating many new ones in the process. Similarly, it pretends to restore justice while generally serving to perpetuate and intensify the injustice that runs deep in a country built by slaves, indentured servants, and prisoners. Indeed, the 13th Amendment outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime, enabling slavery to continue to this day with the help of concrete walls and razor wire. As Randy Hudson notes in “Wynne’s World,” a nonfiction submission featured in this folio, “Slave labor is alive and well in Texas.”
Recently, Bellingham Review received a large influx of submissions from writers incarcerated in facilities all over the U.S. In the past, we’ve included submissions from incarcerated writers among our pages, such as Corey Devon Arthur’s Pushcart Prize nominated essay “We Talked Like We Were Still Locked Up Teens” in Issue 88. Issue 90 includes a folio exclusively featuring the recent work of incarcerated writers. Also in Issue 90, we are excited to share a conversation between our Editor-in-Chief Jane Wong and Jamie Silvonek on her new book of poems, Marginal Verse (Game Over Books, 2025).
Without further ado, I present Window Inside. Thank you for spending some time here.
Sincerely,
Kelsey Tribble
Managing Editor
Fiction
“The Subtlest Sound” by Paulus Perkins
Poetry
“My Window” by Matthew Feeney
“Heart of Life” and “Heart on the Line” by Charles Hill
“Mistress” by D.T. Holt
Creative Nonfiction
“Wynne’s World” by Randy Hudson
“Deaths of Despair” by Johnny Lynch Jr.