Roots. Wounds. Words. From the Outside is a literary arts program that provides writing pedagogy as well as performance and publication opportunities for storytellers who happen to be on probation, on parole and/or formerly incarcerated.

In alignment with restorative and transformative justice goals, Roots. Wounds. Words. assists participating storytellers and the communities from which they come in healing from harm by providing opportunities for OUR storytellers to reflect on, engage, excavate, and write about the root causes and effects of the harms they’ve both inflicted and endured through nonfiction, fiction, playwriting, and poetry.

Literary arts promotes the empathy, understanding, accountability, and emotional processing that are necessary to achieve the individual and collective healing that restorative justice aims for. Roots. Wounds. Words. offers literary arts programming that provides justice-involved individuals with an opportunity to reestablish identities above and apart from that of “felon” or “criminal”, encourages positive thinking, as well as serves as a tool for humanization and reconciliation.

Since 2019, Roots. Wounds. Words. has provided our From the Outside programming to justice-involved storytellers. Roots. Wounds. Words. would love to partner with your criminal justice community supervision organization to bring this restorative and transformative program to the people under your supervision.