Client: Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration

Let Me Tell You is a collection of first-person stories about the experience and impact of long imprisonment in Michigan.

With a goal of providing a framework for the Michigan’s prisoner advocacy movement, this storytelling initiative, created for the Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration, was developed with Invisible Engines with guidance from the American Friends Service Committee and the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project and Carceral State Project.

Working with a group of key stakeholders on both the inside and outside, Sarah and partner Linette Lao developed a strategy for soliciting first-person stories from people serving life and longterm prison sentences in the state of Michigan. In both outreach and presentation, we chose language and framing that invited in the humanity of the writers who are in so many ways shut out. Together with our partners, we developed a framework for receiving, reviewing, publishing the stories solicited from 31 prisons. We also created a production map and editorial guidelines to support the volunteers who power this project

All of the stories received through Let Me Tell You will be archived at the University of Michigan.