In this article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, John J. Lennon writes about the endless opportunities for people like himself, now that the ban on Pell Grants for prisoners has been lifted.
EXCERPT
That writing workshop was my most important educational experience. A part of me feels Doran Larson sacrificed his writerly ambitions so we in that workshop could, if only for a moment, feel like we were something more than inmate, prisoner, murderer, this evil thing. That something more was a published writer. He gave me that. I owe my career to him. With writing, editors don’t look at where you went to college, they look at your work, your bylines — and mine, I’m told, measure up with the best. That has a lot to do with grit. College presidents, I hear, want more college students to have it. Prison is where you can find that trait in abundance.