Prison officials around the country have wide latitude to restrict prisoners’ freedom of expression, and that affects writers behind bars
Did or did not the prisoner turn into a bird and fly away? That’s what the officials want to know in Matthew Mendoza’s Freedom Feather, a short dialogue-driven work of magical realism. The play was originally censored by the Texas Department of Corrections for the use of the word escape. It’s hard to imagine a single word in a dramatic work constituting a safety risk—especially in a context so exaggeratedly fictional it becomes fantastical. But that was the only articulated official justification.
Freedom Feather garnered second prize standing in PEN America’s 2018 Prison Writing Awards, a contest celebrating incarcerated writers, but it almost didn’t make it out of the prison where Mendoza writes from.
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