- Jordan Pugh
- May 21, 2022
As my semester as a PWE intern at APBP comes to an end, I find myself wishing for more time—clinging to the valuable moments that remain for me in the Book Room of the Aull Center. It took me about a month and a half, maybe even two months, to acclimate to the APBP culture and my role within the organization. Now that I fit nicely on the bookshelf, so to speak, I am sad that so few weeks remain before I say my goodbyes to WVU. I wish to convey my lifelong loyalty to promoting literacy and higher education in prison with this parting. During my internship at APBP, I made professional connections and gained invaluable real-world experience as a paraprofessional. I grew as a writer, editor, and activist.
My internship duties evolved over the semester. I started with a refresher by responding to book requests from people in prison. I took the photo to the right in the Aull Center, where the Appalachian Prison Book Project's Book Room is. These packages contain books ready to be mailed to people in prison, many of which I wrapped myself. HEP work is so rewarding because people wait eagerly to receive those books, often for months to hear their name at mail call. Responding to book requests is a general volunteer task but is truly the heart of the Appalachian Prison Book Project. Without people responding to letters, matching, and mailing out books, there would be no APBP. After refamiliarizing myself with the book mailing process, I started to take on more extensive, long-term projects.
First, as my initiative and confidence grew, so did my acceptance and role within the core organization. I have always been a self-starter. Interestingly, one of my first and most meaningful projects was obtaining 15 copies of Volume 1 of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison (JHEP) for students participating in an upcoming Higher Education in Prison program. This project started with me doing some elective reading. I read the first journal volume and sent my notes to Dr. Ryan. Within those notes, I mentioned a desire to get copies of the journal into the hands of scholars who are incarcerated. Dr. Ryan encouraged me and provided me with the proper contacts. From there, I corresponded with Mary Gould from the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison to submit the copy request form. Although the short-term book club at SCI-Greene was postponed until next semester due to COVID restrictions, the journals will be waiting for their eager eyes, humble hands, and earnest hearts.
Second, I took a creative approach to the blog post I wrote for APBP. First, I read through the entire archive of APBP blog posts. I established that I wanted to write about something no one had written about yet and do it in a genre and style new to the site. I wrote six drafts of this post because I wanted to maintain the original phrasing of the letters I responded to without sharing any of the writers’ personal information. In my third draft, I even tried incorporating photos of the letters in their entirety. However, the photographs were not aesthetically pleasing and posed privacy concerns. I also balanced the purpose of the piece: to highlight the struggles of accessing literature for people in prison with a strong authorial voice to establish ethos. To achieve this balance, I presented excerpts from the letters as quotations, which enabled me to omit personal information, otherwise maintaining the original style.
Last, I am pleased to say that the APBP Board approved the Remote Wrapping Google Form I created at December’s Board Meeting, and it will go into use following the new year. The proposal I presented at the October Board Meeting got tabled. The board members asked me to revise the form to APBP’s shade of blue and remove the question and comment box. The board was very pleased with the changes I made. A board member even introduced another new Google Form at the December meeting. It seems that this project has inspired APBP to move all their logs and sign-outs to a Google Form, which will create consistency among communication processes.