Executive Director Zachary Thomas co-founded Writers in Residence in 2017, an organization dedicated to empowering youths in juvenile justice systems by teaching creative writing workshops and giving them a voice. This program started as a student-run organization at John Carroll University when Thomas was an undergraduate student, working alongside co-founders Anthony Shoplik, Rachel Schratz, and Michalena Mezzopera. Since its start, WIR has expanded to 12 cohorts across Ohio, with 1,344 residents who have participated in the creative writing workshops. At the end of each nine-week session, residents’ work is published in a chapbook and read aloud at a chapbook release party.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the inspiration behind starting this program?
We were in a service learning course where you participate in a community volunteer activity. I had a lot of friends who were part of a program called Carroll Ballers. They would play basketball at the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center with the youth. In that class, we got to reflect and talk about our different service experiences. What prompted the idea was a lot of their grievances that they had with their program. They couldn’t have certain conversations and had certain restrictions that, when they were mentioned to me at a time, didn’t make a lot of sense. It was a simple question of, how do we just facilitate a space for the youth to freely express themselves and write about their feelings without any sort of negative consequences? We worked with the Carroll Ballers program on a pilot experience. We played basketball and facilitated a workshop with writing activities. The conversations that we were able to have were more engaging, more in depth. They got to see a different side of the residents because of the vehicle of engagement that we used. We did a general survey for the residents: Did you like this experience? Is it something that you would want to continue to participate in? And they were like, yeah, this is actually different. It was nothing we’ve done before but super beneficial. That’s what motivated us to come up with a more formal plan of implementation.
How did the plan of implementation progress?
The initial start was just pitching it to the facilities with the survey results that we collected from this pilot. We had qualitative information from the residents who participated, and I think that helped with encouraging the staff at the facility that the youth enjoyed the program. In 2018, we all graduated. I was offered a fellowship position called the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards through the Cleveland Foundation, and it was to pursue three different things: How do we further replicate the program model that we just created at one university? How do we replicate that across the state of Ohio? What does the reentry space look like for youth when they are leaving the facility; what resources are available to them? I think the third was really concentrating on a larger statewide concentration of issues as to what is driving youth incarceration. In a year exploring that, we got our first replication, and it was here at Oberlin at the Lorain County juvenile detention center. After that first replication, it sent a signal to the other facilities that we wanted to work with them, and then it snowballed from there.
What was the reasoning behind teaching workshops to youth in specific?
Youth had been the focus at the time. There’s not a lot of programming inside juvenile facilities at large. Adult facilities have a lot more resources and access to activities and programs compared to the youth. To focus our efforts into a niche, sticking with the youth made a lot of sense for our own capacity as an organization.
What kind of impacts have you seen on an individual level and as a whole?
It’s varied, but the one thing that we try to achieve through the work is seeing an increase in residents’ literacy and writing disposition. We know that over time, they will feel more self aware about themselves as people in a system, in the community. They’re going to feel more confident about themselves individually but also about their writing and reading skills. There’s something incredibly magical and special about having undergraduate students as volunteers because there’s a proximity in age. When you’re working with a 16-, 17-year-old and they’re talking to a 19-, 20-year old, they think: in a few years I could be in your position, right? So on the individual level, there’s a lot of intrinsic development. I think the culture that we’ve been able to change has also been very significant. Starting this work eight years ago, a lot of people with their 24/7 supervision of youth and detention, could become jaded and forget that the youth that we work with are still teenagers. They’re still kids. There is a level of forgetting that the residents are more than just their own circumstance. There’s a whole backstory that isn’t in their case files as to why they’re imprisoned in the first place. I think a lot of the work that this service does offers you a different perspective.
What was the program’s initial mission and has that changed since it first started?
When we were a student organization, we didn’t really have a mission. But I think we’ve always wanted to teach creative writing to empower youth and their voice. I think we as a team knew that that’s what we wanted to do, but we never articulated it until we became a nonprofit.
How has Writers in Residence made an impact on the larger community?
The chapbook release parties that we have are an extension of our advocacy. The chapbooks transcend whatever time and space that the youth are in so that their work exists infinitely. When we get to invite former residents to come back and share and read their stories, I think that’s every nonprofit’s goal. How do you present your service population or your client base in front of an audience without it being tokenized for that individual? The way we frame it is more of a party, and we want to celebrate the release of these new stories. It’s just a wider net that we get to cast for individuals. A lot of the time when we are in the community, the first thing that I usually hear is, “Oh, I never knew this existed.” Not everyone is thinking about the justice system because they’re not involved in that space. Once we raise that awareness, how do we then inform of the true nature of the system based on someone else’s lived experience? We’re just presenting it for you. Most of us really start to believe something when it comes from the individual who it impacted.
What are some of the proudest moments and greatest pitfalls you’ve experienced in this program?
This was my first job out of college, so I didn’t have a boss to learn from or someone to manage under for a while. This was a lot of “learn as you go.” With that comes a lot of pitfalls of, “Am I making the right decision with X, Y, Z? Have I perfected it?” I’ve worked on a few things. I think our most recent party I’m so very proud of. We had the highest number of former residents come to that event. It was only four, which sounds low, but when you consider individual circumstances across the board for everyone to get out of the system, have a stable lifestyle, and stay in communication with us. This was the first time it all came together. Plus, their family and friends got to come to the event. They’re like, “I’ve known this person for so long and I never got to see them like this.” It was definitely a proud moment having our former residents and their family in a space to see them perform their work.
What are some future directions for Writers in Residence?
This is a hard question to answer because the juvenile justice system in the state of Ohio is changing. Governor Mike De-Wine has created a juvenile justice task force who have come up with 26 different recommendations. One is that they want to restructure the physical architecture of the juvenile prisons in the state of Ohio. The other thing that I think the future of the organization can consider is further expansion. At one point before the pandemic, we had workshops from Northeast Ohio to Southwest Ohio. How does one maintain that level of programming? I think structurally it can happen, but there isn’t a lot of funding in arts and culture and juvenile justice work. Current trends say otherwise, so maybe in the next few years there will be more concentrated funding toward justice and arts-related organizations. There’s also something to be said about how we can become a resource for other groups or organizations outside of the state of Ohio who want to do some of their work in their own state. We have different laws, so we can only provide what our programming looks like and see if we can be just a consultant to someone in a different state. These are questions that the future of the work will consider.
