7 AUGUST 7-13, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | JoyBelle Phelan believes that no one should be reduced to their worst moment. Phelan’s own story is her best proof of the importance of that fi erce belief: Her worst moments led to her incarceration — but that incarceration in turn led to the work she’s proud to do now, on the outside. Phelan is executive director of Unbound Authors, a nonprofi t founded to “provide op- portunities for incarcerated writers to imag- ine themselves as storytellers and sources of authentic knowledge,” according to its web- site. In order to push that program into the mainstream, Unbound Authors is creating a network of schools and other nonprofi ts that support system-impacted writers not just in Colorado, but beyond the state’s borders. Phelan became involved with similar programs organized by the University of Denver’s Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI) during her seven-year incarceration at the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo for embezzlement. “The very fi rst class that came to La Vista was one called ‘Writing the Breath,’” recalls Phelan. “It was a writ- ing and meditation thing. Every week, we’d learn a new breathing technique along with some sort of a writing prompt. And then your homework over that next week was to practice your breathing exercise, and write something — a poem, part of a story, something. It was so cool.” At the end of twelve weeks, the instructor gave each participant a copy of a collection of the class’s work. “It was a ‘zine, essentially,” Phelan says, and smiles. “So we were all of a sudden published authors, right? For me, it was the fi rst time that I’d been celebrated for my writing. That was incredible.” Fostering that feeling is exactly what the Prison Arts Initiative was designed to do when three academics, including Ashley Hamilton, who became the director, founded the program at DU in 2017. It quickly at- tracted other talented local creatives who wanted to improve the quality of life for incarcerated individuals through artistic expression. Working under a contract with the Colo- rado Department of Corrections, DU PAI projects gave prisoners the opportunity to set an explicit goal — creating a poem, par- ticipating in a play, recording a story about their past — and make positive changes in their lives, whether or not they were ever released. But then a sudden split sent many of those programs into solitary. In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, DU PAI and the CDOC collaborated on a prison radio program known as Inside Wire. The programming was created by prisoners, but while Inside Wire’s primary focus was serving incarcerated listeners — beaming music, stories, information and other enter- tainment into prisons across Colorado — it also reached an outside audience through internet broadcasting. It was the fi rst and only radio station in the country, perhaps the world, broadcasting 24/7 from inside prisons to the public at large. Ryan Conarro, an outsider who served as general manager and program director of Inside Wire, came to the prison radio sta- tion by way of journalism. “I had the same moral assessment of people in the system: that people must in some way deserve being there. That it was the result of a personal failing instead of a systemic issue,” he says, shaking his head. “But my fi rst job out of col- lege was with a community radio station as a features reporter, and at that time I started doing some volunteer SEAN MARSHALL continued on page 8
