EventsCommon Ground
A Little Piece of Light: Donna Hylton
Donna Hylton with JoAnne Page
Thursday, October 21, 2021 12:30 p.m. Eastern / 9:30 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Criminal justice activists Donna Hylton and JoAnne Page sit down for a conversation on alternatives to incarceration. We conclude with a reading of Galal El-Behairy’s ‘A Letter from Tora Prison’ by Pierre Joris.
In this Talk
Find A Little Piece of Light: A Memoir of Hope, Prison, and a Life Unbound (Hachette Books 2018) by Donna Hylton here →
More information to come!
Donna Hylton
Women’s rights activist, criminal justice reform advocate, author and accomplished public speaker, Donna Hylton spent 27 years behind bars, including two and a half in solitary confinement. After her release from prison, she founded A Little Piece of Light, an organization named after her memoir which advocates for the rights of system-impacted women and helps them re-enter society after incarceration. She is a founding member of The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and an alumna of the first cohort of Leading with Conviction Fellows of JustLeadershipUSA.
JoAnne Page
Criminal justice activist JoAnne Page has more than 45 years’ experience in criminal justice, with the last 30+ at the helm of The Fortune Society. Under her stewardship, The Fortune Society has been recognized by researchers and policymakers as a pioneer in assisting former prisoners reintegrate into society—serving more than 8,000 people annually through programs including ATI, permanent, supportive and scattered site housing, mental health services, education, employment services, substance abuse treatment, counseling, care management, a recovery center, and HIV/AIDS health services. In 2018 JoAnne was honored by City & State New York as one of the top 50 nonprofit CEOs in NYC.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨