Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558612730
Publication Date: 03-01-2002

Foreword by Tracy Huling

Breaking histories of silence and invisibility, Wall Tappings presents an international collection of women's writings, from prisons around the world and across centuries. “These are the marginal texts in a tradition of marginal texts,” writes Judith A. Scheffler in introducing her groundbreaking anthology of writing by women prisoners. Unique in its geographic and historical ranges, this rich collection gives a voice to women whose stories have been long neglected. Speaking from settings as diverse as a Roman prison cell in 203 AD, the labor camps of Siberia in the 1930s, and a Philippines prison in the 1980s, these writers explore the ways in which actual incarceration rests in the shadow of imprisonment within larger society.

"This book is a groundbreaking one, important not only to women and penologists, but to all who care about the human condition and the survival of the spirit. I cannot recommend Wall Tappings highly enough." —Joseph Bruchac, author of Dawn Land

"The struggle of a woman in prison to define and articulate her self and her relation to others, the struggle to keep her spirit alive and to send messages to us outside those walls is itself an exemplary act. Wall Tappings is a fine introduction to the varieties of that struggle." —Women's Review of Books