Art and storytelling to recreate the lives of justice-affected people.
To create, again.
Who We Are.
The roots of Re/Creation go back to the spring of 2017, when writer and justice reform activist John Proctor began facilitating a creative writing workshop for older men detained at the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC) on Rikers Island. Sensing both the creative talent and the need for support in their respective journeys through the New York carceral apparatus, John decided to maintain communication with many of those workshop members even as they moved on from Rikers. One of those initial workshop members, Michael Colbert, also took a writing workshop at Queensboro Correctional Facility two years later in 2019 as he was finishing up his sentence, and he introduced John to the facilitator of that workshop, Professor Joni Schwartz of LaGuardia Community College. Together, John and Joni started a reentry writing workshop at Restoration Plaza that year, attracting both new and established writers to the collective.
Around this time, something truly magical happened - the members of the workshop at Restoration Plaza began advocating for each other, not just as writers but as people struggling with the rigors and challenges of returning from incarceration. Bringing in the talents and vision of organizer/advocate Marzian Alam and writer/editor Jaclyn Watterson, what started as a writing workshop became a self-sustaining writers’ collective. Based on the vision of founding Rikers workshop member Antonio Battle, we began calling ourselves Re/Creation. When COVID-19 hit in the early spring of 2020, the workshop was such a lifeline to its members that we moved it online, got a fiscal sponsor, and decided together to become an organization built around using writing and art as pathways to empathy and community.
What We Do.
Re/Creation is a non-profit organization created in support of The Re/Creation Creative Collective, a community of writers and artists with a shared vision for abolition and a world free of oppression who support each other to express that vision through creative works. As part of a creative collective, members share and develop each other's work through Tuesday evening workshops, and find opportunities to collaborate on creative work.
The Re/Creation Creative Collective’s work can be found on reslashcreation.org, under the sections The Work and Dispatches. Audiences and community members can also stay up to date with R/C by signing up for the weekly newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus, which shares various people in our networks’ perspectives on current events and issues related to the criminal legal system in America. You can sign up for that below.
Throughout the year, R/C also hosts public readings to invite different audiences to engage with our work and facilitates workshops to encourage restorative healing through creative expression.
