Book Launch Second Edition of Concrete Mama

book launch & panel discussion   celebrating the re-publication of Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla   January 22, 2019 6:00 p.m.  (doors open at 5:30 p.m.)   North Creek Events Center   Light refreshments will be served

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The University of Washington Libraries, the Washington Prison History Project (      @waprisonhistory), and the University of Washington Press are pleased to invite you to the launch of the expanded new edition of Concrete Mama. The acclaimed photojournalistic collaboration between reporter John McCoy and photographer Ethan Hoffman won the Washington State Book Award in 1982, offering unprecedentedly frank dispatches from inmates’ lives inside the Washington State Penitentiary. Concrete Mama’s long-awaited rerelease contains a new introduction by prison scholar, author, and educator Dan Berger.

 

An on-site exhibit of the late photographer Ethan Hoffman’s striking images of life inside of Walla Walla offers a glimpse of the experiences of incarcerated people during a transitional time in the state’s prison policy. A panel of compelling speakers will discuss imprisonment since the 1980s: 

 

·        John McCoy, the book’s original author

·        Dan Berger, contributor to the new edition

·        Gerard Boseman, UW student, Black Prisoners Caucus

·        Amani Sawari, independent journalist and national spokesperson for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak

·        Ed Mead and Mark Cook, activists both formerly incarcerated at Walla Walla (Mead is featured

in Concrete Mama’s Ch. 9; Cook co-founded the Black Panther Party chapter at the penitentiary)

 

This event will also feature contributions from people currently incarcerated in Washington, and showcase

The Washington Prison History Project: http://waprisonhistory.org/,

presenting scholarship reflecting the history and ongoing reality of mass incarceration,

with materials from the project’s archive:  http://diglib.uwb.edu/wphp.