Michelle Kuo is an activist, lawyer, and author of the award-winning book Reading with Patrick, which explores literacy and incarceration in the Mississippi Delta. She has worked as lawyer for undocumented people, detained immigrants, and incarcerated people. Michelle was an associate professor at the American University of Paris and has taught in prisons in France, Taiwan, and the United States. Currently she lives in Taiwan.

Simone Davis teaches at the University of Toronto, in Ethics, Society and Law. In 2005 she was trained by the men in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program to become a prison educator. After working on staff with Inside-Out for five years, in 2010 Simone co-founded Walls to Bridges, a national Canadian program that brings together incarcerated and university-based students as classmates. The Walls to Bridges Collective is committed to liberatory education practices, to prisoner-led trainings, and to spreading awareness about the experiences of the people who are in or coming out of Canadian prisons for women.

Hannah Davis Taieb, founder of the association Dialogue & Transformation, is a professor of intercultural communication and an experienced educator in small group facilitation. Of North American origin, she has lived in Paris for thirty years. She is connected to questions of prison since she remembers her own father’s incarceration due to his political beliefs during the McCarthy period in the USA. She is currently training to become a Gestalt psychotherapist.

Vinny Nguyen is a father, husband, and facilitator of Kid CAT (Creating Awareness Together), a group of men who committed crimes as teens and were sentenced as adults to life terms. The group’s mission is to inspire humanity through education, mentorship and restorative practices. Vinny was incarcerated for 20 years and was released in 2016. He lives in California and works to advance human rights in Vietnam.

Lorraine Pinnock is an advocate for people transitioning from the criminal injustice system to healthy communities. After spending nearly five years under correctional institution supervision, she believes that providing disadvantaged people with higher education and academic development can radically ensure one’s success to break the revolving door trap of admission, discharge, and re-admission of incarceration. counts Lorraine is a founding member of the Walls-to-Bridges Collective, based in Kitchener, Ontario.

Audrey Chenu, a teacher from the 93 department in France, is a slammer and boxing trainer for women and children through her association: Un ring pour tou.te.s. Incarcerated at the age of 18, she shaped her weapons in prison: sports and writing, her two passions. She published her autobiography in 2013, Girlfight.

H W was incarcerated for 27 months in the Fleury-Mérogis prison. This experience deeply marked him and he wishes to work to break the myth of prison and all the clichés that are attached to it. Prison is not an obligatory passage for young people from the neighborhoods and does not make them stronger, contrary to what many of them may think. He would like to break this vicious circle by inventing tools and liberating methodologies for youth.

“Cultivate your legitimate strangeness.”

René Char (Partage formel)

The path that I have been on from my childhood in Algeria until today has been traced by books, stones or bricks to build myself, to think, to live, like Tom Thumb with his trail made of pebbles.

Once in France, I studied to be a librarian. I practiced this fascinating profession from 1979 to 2002, exploring all the possible forms of cultural action around books. In 1989, a group of librarians from the Essonne, including those of us from Massy, founded the association Lire c'est Vivre, working to develop reading in prisons by creating direct access libraries in Fleury Mérogis, the largest prison in Europe, with about 4000 inmates, men and women.

From that day on, “Monday for Fleury” was the day for our volunteer team, and we started reading circles and in parallel opened more and more libraries, now a total of ten. As of today, March 2022, I am still present.