Imani Perry has won the inaugural Inside Literary Prize, the first ever American book award judged exclusively by people incarcerated in prisons.
Perry was named the winner for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon To Understand the Soul of a Nation, published in 2022 by Ecco. The book previously won the National Book Award.
Three other books were on the prize’s shortlist: Tess Gunty’s novel, The Rabbit Hutch, Jamil Jan Kochai’s story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, and Roger Reeves’ poetry collection Best Barbarian.
More than 200 incarcerated people voted on the prize. One, an inmate at Minnesota Correctional Facility–Shakopee identified as Chelsea, said, “Being a judge…just meant a lot for me. It meant that my voice mattered, because for the last four and a half years, my voice hasn’t mattered. I got to be Chelsea. I wasn’t just my number.”
Perry reacted to the award, saying, “I think this prize is most of all a recognition of readers, and may this recognition of the intellectual life that exists behind bars extend much further.…God bless the organizers who believe in freedom. And, to the people inside, please know when I say ‘we’ and when I refer to ‘my people,’ I mean you too.”
The Inside Literary Prize was launched by the groups Freedom Reads, the National Book Foundation, and Center for Justice Innovation, along with Lori Feathers, the owner of Interabang Books in Dallas.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads, emceed the award ceremony in New York on Thursday evening. The award comes with a cash prize of $4,860, which, according to the organizers, “represents five years’ of work at 54-cents-per-hour, the wage earned by Betts when he was incarcerated and worked in the prison library.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
