Professor Larson’s new book highlights testimonies of incarcerated individuals
By Gregoire Winston ’26, Editor-in-Chief
In early Jan. 2024, Edward North Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Doran Larson published Inside Knowledge: Incarcerated People on the Failures of the American Prison via NYU Press. The 328 page work examines “the American prison system through the eyes of those who are trapped within it,” as stated by the publisher’s description.
Marc. M. Howard, Founder and President of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, praises the book for offering readers “a window into the brutal realities concealed within prison walls, exposing the grim wisdom that incarcerated individuals have for so long carried in silence. In so doing, he illuminates the gap in public perception between the peace that prisons supposedly deliver and the destruction they actually wreck.”
Prof. Larson’s newly published work follows in line with his previous prison-justice projects. From 2006–2016, Larson taught a creative writing class from inside Attica Correctional Facility, located two and a half
hours west of Hamilton. In 2011, Larson, in conjunction with Radical Teacher peer-review journal, published Abolition From Within: Enabling The Citizen Convict. In 2014, he released The Beautiful Prison within the legal studies journal Studies in Law, Politics and Society and Fourth City: Essays From The Prison in America through Michigan State
University Press. His work has been featured by The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publi-
cations.
Following the release of his latest work in 2014, Larson spearheaded the growth of the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), whose mission strives to “replace misrepresentation of prisons and imprisoned people with first-person witness by those living in legalized confinement,” as stated on the archive’s official website. The accounts of the archive document prisoner experiences starting in 2009. With the support of a $2.3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the APWA has plans
of digitizing its earliest first-person accounts in the near future.
Appointed as Hamilton faculty in 1998, Larson received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Santa Cruz and Masters of Arts degree and Doctorate of Philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Today, Larson teaches courses revolving around prison writing, witness literature, and the history of the novel. His recent courses include Study of the Novel, Written on the Wall: Twentieth-Century American Prison Writing and The Hollywood Novel: Literature, Adaptation, Screenwriting, and Production, among others.
