Renee Winter

Renee Winter started teaching poetry in the Santa Cruz Main Jail seven years ago, after retiring from her law practice. Now, once a week, she sits in a locked room with about 15 incarcerated men. She often marvels at how her “big-knuckled, burly male students can grip such tiny tools and write. But they do.” Not once in all her years, she says, has she had to press the panic button. Instead, she has found inspiration and shed her “one-dimensional” view of incarceration.