When I Run in My Bare Feet: Music, Writing, and Theater in a North Carolina Women's Prison

��� A group of nearly a dozen women sit together singing, tapping rhythms on a table, and calling out ideas for lyrics and rhymes to one another, as a man with a guitar alternately strums chords and writes down the words to the songs they are writing together. Their music making continues almost seven years of creative collaboration and experimentation across three different media. Throughout it all, the women have resided inside the Raleigh Correctional Center for Women—a minimum-security prison in the capital of North Carolina. The prison itself serves both as the setting for this workshop—likely the only place in which these particular women would be regularly engaging with the arts—and as the primary force that identifies the workshop participants as part of the same community: marking them with the stigma of criminality, limiting their future prospects for professional advancement, and forcing them to live together in close quarters and unpleasant conditions. The women gather once a week in this arts workshop setting within the prison to engage with one another and with various processes of artistic creation, managing not to escape but to enrich and embolden their carceral reality for a couple of hours.