"Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison" w/ Chris Hedges

Please support The Sanctuary for Independent Media! For more information and to donate, visit: https://www.mediasanctuary.org

This talk by author, activist, teacher and dissident Chris Hedges at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY is about his new book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” released on October 19, 2021 by publisher Simon & Schuster.

Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for a month in 2018 to sold-out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, and later be published, students gave words to the grief and suffering they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams. The class’s artistic and personal discovery, as well as transformation, is chronicled in heart-breaking detail in Our Class. This book gives a human face and a voice to those our society too often demonizes and abandons. It exposes the terrible crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose.

Recorded at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY on June 28, 2021.

Become a Sanctuary Sustainer! Set up a regular contribution of any amount at: https://connect.clickandpledge.com/w/...

Cameras – Eleanor Goldsmith, Jill Malouf, Elizabeth Press, Claire Hutchinson
Audio – Troy Pohl
Director – Branda Miller

Production – Steve Pierce
Post production – Alexandra Shablovsky