Virtual performances of The BOX in October set the stage for deeper conversations on solitary confinement and mass incarceration. 

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Playwright Sarah Shourd, a survivor of Solitary Confinement, wrote The BOX in collaboration with other survivors, including actor Dameion Brown, who starred in the show. Based on a three-year investigation by Shroud into the horrors of solitary Confinement, The BOX is a piece of transformational theatre that asks us to rexamine long-held notions of punishment.

Bryan Washington, guest judge for our 2020 short story contest, is always on the lookout for stories displaying "a keen sense of place and a palpable intimacy"

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Dutch Simmons answers that call with "Solitary" the first of four contest finalists we'll publish throughout October. The place is a 9-by-6 cell in solitary confinement "the prison within the prison," and the intimacy comes via the first-person perspective of a man with nothing to do but pace and think during the day and sleep "on a metal slab, like a cadaver" at night, "guilt...my blanket." - David Duhr, fiction editor.