Food for Thought
Unpacking Justice, Policy, and Artistic Advocacy
Speaker
Jeff MorenoffDate & time
Location
Join the Ford School community for this semester's second installment of "Food for Thought". This month's conversation will be held on Wednesday, February 14, 2024. Associate Dean Jeff Morenoff will host a panel with staff from the Prison Creative Arts Project to discuss Unpacking Justice, Policy, and Artistic Advocacy.
Please join us to share your thoughts and learn more! Pizza will be provided on a first-come first-serve basis.
About "Food for Thought"
Roughly once a month, we will convene community conversations to devour pizza and discuss burning issues in policy and politics. These off-the-record conversations will aim to foster frank and open dialogue among Ford students, faculty, and staff. Each session will feature one or more Ford professors or scholars with relevant expertise, but these will not be lectures. They will be guided conversations in which we share both comments and questions, listen and learn from one another, and seek to co-produce knowledge on policy issues in the United States and around the world. Please come to learn more and to share your ideas.
Speaker bios:
Pete Martel: Pete Martel is a Program Coordinator at AFSC's Michigan Criminal Justice Program in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In this role he works with volunteers and interns to carry out direct service advocacy work with people incarcerated in Michigan's prison system. He is leading up individual liberation work for long and life serving people in Michigan's prisons. He has worked in various capacities in Michigan's criminal legal system and is currently a graduate student in the University of Michigan's Sociology Department. His research interests include the legal system, criminal procedure, and punishment. Pete loves music.
Cozine Welsh Jr.: Cozine Welch is the Organizer for Ending Life and Long Sentences with the AFSC Michigan Criminal Justice Program. He is also a poet, community researcher, and educator. His written work has been published in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Plough Quarterly, the Periphery, and eleven consecutive volumes of the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, where he held the position of Managing Editor. He is also the former Executive Director of A Brighter Way, a nonprofit organization based in Washtenaw County, a Community Researcher for the University of Michigan Carceral State Research Project, as well as a former instructor of the Atonement Project and Theatre & Incarceration courses at the University of Michigan focused on restorative justice, reconciliation, atonement, and the role of the arts in healing and rehabilitation.
Jennifer Avery (she/her): Jennifer Avery is a Trauma Informed Peer Lead Reentry Navigator and a lifelong resident of Michigan who grew up in the Oakland County area. She and her family struggled; at age five her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. At a very young age, Jennifer became the caretaker for two younger siblings and looked out for others while neglecting herself. At age 20 she was incarcerated and spent the next 20 years in the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC). In prison, Jennifer was frequently depressed and suicidal but made a concerted effort to build a life and earned two college degrees. Upon release from MDOC over two years ago, she decided to pursue the Trauma Informed Peer Led Reentry training program to assist others traveling a similar path to her own. As a Trauma Informed Peer Led Navigator with ABW, Jennifer continues to be passionate about helping others, while learning and growing herself.
Kyle Daniel-Bey: Kyle Daniel-Bey received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. Daniel-Bey is a writer, artist, co-organizer of the Hamtramck Free School and a former member of the Writer’s Block at the Macomb Regional Correctional Facility. His work has appeared in Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education (2013), The Washington Square Review at New York University, University of Michigan Press, among others. In 2021, Daniel-Bey, together with Jonathan Rajewski, published How to Start a Writing Workshop (Free School Press), a manual co-constructed with incarcerated poets, artists and activists throughout the United States in response to the precarity of educational programming inside prisons and with the aim of supporting the emergence of autonomous creative writing workshops without permission and without state approval. He has exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the College for Creative Studies, and the University of Michigan, among others. He has been a guest lecturer at the Yale School of Art, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. He lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.