JUDITH TANNENBAUM / By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives

Judith Tannenbaum was brought up with a love of books and storytelling in a convivial Jewish community in Los Angeles. Spoon Jackson was one of fifteen brothers raised in a two-room cement shack in the Mojave Desert. Judith rolls coffee cake with her Bubbe; Spoon runs a dry riverbed with feral dogs. Spoon is sentenced to life in prison when he is twenty; Judith is married by the same age.

By Heart tells stories of Judith’s passion for poetry and Spoon’s hunger to transcend his past and open his world. Judith longs to find, like Gertrude Stein, a “charmed circle” of artists; the one she discovers is in a basement classroom at San Quentin Prison. As a teacher in California’s Arts-in-Corrections program, Judith recognizes Spoon’s true gifts as a poet, and so begins their decades-long relationship as writers, friends and explorers of human imagination and spirit.

Tannenbaum examines inequities in education and injustice in our prison system. Her primary focus remains, though, on the path of two lives and the power of art at the center of each. By Heart reminds the reader, in words Jackson spoke in a prison production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “You are human beings nonetheless. As far as one can see. Of the same species as myself.”

“A boy with no one to listen becomes a man in prison for life. He reads for the first time, and discovers his mind can be free. A woman poet enters prison to teach, becomes his first listener, and so begin twenty-five years of friendship between two gifted writers and poets. The result is By Heart, a book that will anger you, give you hope and break your heart. In other words, their book will open your heart.” — Gloria Steinem

Judith Tannenbaum is the author of memoir, poetry, texts for teachers, and guidebooks, including the Manual For Artists Working In Prison. She currently serves as training coordinator with WritersCorps, a program of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Spoon Jackson is a published writer who began serving a Life Without Possibility of Parole sentence in 1977. His work has received awards from the William James Association’s Prison Arts Project and from PEN American Center’s Prison Writing Program and has been used as text in films and musical suites. He facilitates two creative writing classes for prisoners at California State Prison, Sacramento.

By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives (Paperback)

By Judith Tannenbaum, Spoon Jackson

$20.00

ISBN-13: 9780981559353
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: New Village Press, 4/2010

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