This academic year has been a banner year for OPEEP! We are proud of and thankful for all the work students, faculty, and staff have put into the project. The growth, expansion of purpose, and deeper grounding of OPEEP at Ohio State is a testimony to the dedication of you all.
Last month several members of the degree cohort and Liberation at the Margins Collective presented at the National Conference of Higher Education in Prison in Cleveland. Please see Selena’s report on the conference in this newsletter. As always, we were thrilled to spread the news about our project in this space, and Liz, Selena, and Roxie were excellent ambassadors for OPEEP. The Knowlton Foundation provided generous funding for Ohio State attendees to cover registration and hotel, and our large contingent met with former students and friends at the conference and attended as many panels as we could fit. We also caught up with our colleagues in the Big Ten Consortium for Higher Education in Prison (Big Ten CHEP). It’s always a pleasure to see these folks in person, since we meet with them on Zoom monthly.
This week on Monday, May 11, we attended the final Improvisation program class at Allen-Oakwood Correctional Institution in Lima. Theatre instructor Margie Anich received a Mellon Foundation Spark Grant administered through the office of the vice provost for the arts, Professor Lisa Florman. Prof. Anich held weekly theatre classes at AOCI throughout the academic year as a part of this grant, and we are thrilled that she will also be teaching a credited Improv class at ORW for the degree cohort this summer semester. The participants were able to invite family members to attend the final performance. AWESOME! (If you know, you know.)
Calling all faculty! We need you to step up over the next year to bring your academic interests, your arts practices, your creativity and commitment, and your time! Our grant renewal from the Mellon Foundation emphasizes expanding our extracurricular programming in our partner prison facilities in Marysville, London, Lancaster and Mansfield. Our aim is to schedule at least one event per prison per month, so please submit your ideas soon.
Calling all OPEEPers! This summer’s literary and arts magazine project is full steam ahead! Students, instructors and faculty, and staff are all welcome to submit their work for consideration. We want this project to showcase the talents you all bring to OPEEP every day, so we can’t do this without you! The call for submissions is again included in this newsletter.
You’ll also find reports from learning communities in this issue and a profile of Professor Octavian Robinson (WGSS and director of the Buckeye Sign Language and Multimodal Collaborative at Ohio State), who will be teaching at ORW this autumn semester.
The university will soon be submitting our application for the cohort students in Marysville to access Title IV funding for tuition (i.e., Pell Grants). We still have a long road ahead of us to ensure tuition sustainability for OPEEP, since not all incarcerated students will be eligible for federal support. We hope that you will all continue to share news and support of OPEEP, because storytelling is the most powerful tool in fundraising efforts. Consider donating to our Campus Campaign and follow us on Instagram @opeep_osu.
We’ll suspend newsletters in June and July but will be back in late August. In the meantime, have a wonderful and rejuvenating summer!
Dr. Tiyi Morris and Dr. Mary Thomas