 Hello friends. We've opened the room a little early. Enjoy the slideshow. And we'll get started at the top of the hour. I'm going to increase the time so you have a chance to read as the slides go by. And welcome to YouTube viewers. Welcome everyone. It started in two minutes. Welcome everyone. I'm going to give it to the top of the hour and let some more folks fill up the room. Thanks for joining us tonight. Right. Thanks for being here tonight. I'm an ESA. I am your. Librarian host. And I want to just thank you all for being here tonight. Thank you so much for being here tonight. Thank you so much for being here tonight. I'm sure it'll come back to me. All right. Well, let me just give a quick little introduction. It's very odd though. I can't do a whole lot without my. What I'm saying. Okay. There we go. Back. Sorry. I don't know how I've done this like 10 million times. But just quickly welcome everybody. Let's start this fresh. Again, do over for me, please. All right. So we are here for our. I'm bittersweet because this is our last. And final program in our bid one city one book event. And I'm super excited because it also involves a staff member. And lots of amazing other people who've been. Mentioned. And with love. So this is part of our big ear hustle campaign. Part of one city one book at San Francisco public library is largest literary campaign. And it's our 17th. So it's very exciting. Also, our last program is also dropping on the last day. So we have a lot of. Ear hustles finals. The last season. Episode. So good timing on everybody's part. And I want to thank all of you for being here. The attendees and folks. They're joining us on the panel from near and far. And for staying up with us. Our library wants to acknowledge that we occupy the unseated and ancestral homeland of the raw, ancestral land of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples. And wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives. Of the raw mutish community. And I'm going to throw in the chat box a couple of links. You should check out, especially. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about a new and led organization in Oakland, so go to a land trust doing amazing work. And. Quick reminder for tomorrow's event, not a one city, one book, but two very amazing humans talking about their new book. Milo far to leave me and Kija Lucas, who is a wonderful photographer. And they're going to be talking about the meaning of home. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and go ahead and talk about the power of transformation and inspiration and creativity. And our panelists, if you've been joining, you know, just like the power of transformation and inspiration and creativity. Inside. And for the folks who are getting outside. So, you know, all the amazing power. I'm really excited to have this panel together to talk about it. And close us out. They're going to be highlighting the role of information access and maintaining inspiration in the carceral context. So let's start with the panel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. San Francisco public library is owned, doctor. Jeannie Austin. Thanks so much. And thank you for that opening. I'm Jeannie Austin. I work with San Francisco public libraries, jail and reentry services department. Through the library, we provide direct library services to people who otherwise would not have any access to them. We're in the San Francisco jails two days every week. And I'm really, really just so blessed to work with a library system that knows that our patrons who are incarcerated are still our library patrons. And I'm also very blessed to get to moderate this panel today. As any so is saying, so many of the one city one book programs have countered the kind of. Cold and statistical narrative that people have around incarceration. And while we don't want to erase the size and the volume of incarceration and the way that it impacts black and indigenous and people's colors, communities and livelihoods. And ripple effects out. So not just while people are incarcerated, but just like the volume. We also know that people who are incarcerated are people. And we know the power of creativity. And of access to information in people's lives, especially when people are incarcerated. So everyone on this panel is an expert really in their field and has come to share some of that knowledge with you. We opened this program with some slides from incarcerated artists and from library patrons who have been incarcerated about the value of access to information and about their own work. And we know that there is a role that almost all of us can play in supporting people who are incarcerated, including in their creative practice. Many of those slides were provided to us by the justice arts coalition who is on SSPL's advisory committee for our Mellon foundation funded grant to help identify where library services actually exist for incarcerated people because they're fairly limited. And if you are interested in being involved in supporting someone in their creative practice while they're incarcerated, I really encourage you to reach out to the justice arts coalition about their partner project, which I've just put a link in the chat for, which is a project that connects mentors and just artists generally across the walls of jails and prisons. I'm going to start by just asking our panelists to say something about themselves and whatever you would like to highlight in the work that you've done is deeply appreciated. Kate, would you be willing to start? I was just about to jump in. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Jeannie. Great to be here with you all. I'm currently the director of prison and justice writing at Penn America, which is an organization that works across literature, freedom of expression and human rights for one department of a much larger spread of work. And I saw our beautiful graphic that talks a lot about our work on the advertisement for this event tonight. What can I tell you about our work? We do so many things. We've been supporting writers in prison for over five decades through elevating their voices in public platforms and connecting artists and writers through the walls and through a high-level fellowship, publications, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We'll talk a little bit more about our work tonight. And without taking too much time, I'm going to pass the baton to Robbie Pollack, who is my colleague since we gave you a little taste of what Penn America is. Thanks, Kate. I'm Robbie Pollack. I'm the program manager for prison and justice writing also at Penn. I guess I come to this work just having experienced incarceration and also the benefits of inside, outside creative collaboration through many, many programs and the gifts of many volunteer hours. And I like to pour that back into our work at Penn America, the knowledge of the inside perspective and the outside perspective and making sure that, you know, we're hearing all the voices. I think it's like really cool to be here and also celebrating the work of Air Hustle and its groundbreaking and long-lasting impact on our approach to hearing the voices of the incarcerated. And what partnerships can mean. So I'm just happy to be here. Should I pass it to, I want to be able to pass it. Like I get a 50-50. So I'm going to pass it to Aaron. Thank you, Robbie. I'm Aaron Boynton. I work for the Colorado State Library and I started working for prison libraries right out of library school. And I haven't looked back since, because I can't imagine a place that is more rewarding, more challenging or more interesting to go to work every day or to work for. So I started out in the Sterling Correctional Facility Libraries in Northern Colorado. There's not much there, just a big prison. And now I work for the State Library, still supporting staff who did the work that I did actually in the facilities who work for the Department of Corrections in Colorado. We support them with training and resources. And we help write library policy and make sure that with all the different libraries in those Department of Corrections facilities, that we try to make them do the things the same way. So that if somebody gets transferred from one place to the next, they know what to expect from their facility library. And I'm going to pass it on to Curtis. Erin, hello everyone. My name is Curtis Tanaka. I am the program manager for justice initiatives at Ithaca SNR. We are a not-for-profit research organization. We do research on post-secondary education broadly. And I lead a team of researchers on higher education in prison. And so we look on a variety of different issues, relevant issues on access to educational opportunities to people who are incarcerated. We've been doing quite a bit of work on access to library and information resources. Partially because we are a sister organization of JSTOR, the academic journal archive, which is also trying to get its resources freely available to people inside. But we've also been doing quite a bit of work on prison media review and censorship, technology, and all these other things that constrain or enable access to information and literature to people who are inside. So happy to, or excited to dig into all of this on our conversation today. Thank you all. And definitely when we're talking about creativity, learning and free, maybe in quotes, expression, we're definitely walking around the edges of those kinds of boundaries of what can be inside and what is inside. But again, we're focusing on the positive in this panel. I'm sure we'll come up. I'd like to start by just asking you all to kind of popcorn out about how each of these is defined in relation to your work when we're talking about, since this is a panel on creativity, learning and free expression. If any of those really jump out to you as something you would like to discuss as part of your work, I would love to hear about it. Not to always be the first one jumping in, but since you set the train off with me, Jeannie, I'll jump on that question. Something we think a lot about in our department at Penn America and prison and justice writing is the sort of soft censorship that happens in prisons around creativity all the time. Robbie, I know you can speak to this in depth as well. So when I think about free expression, I think about the fact that folks in prison technically have First Amendment rights, but the way that people are really clamped down on or really punished for using their voices when they're particularly getting success as writers or artists, or in some way reporting out on whether that's creatively or journalistically what's happening in the prison that paints the prison on flattering light, which as we know there's many ways to do so. So we see a lack of freedom of expression or really censorship happening in book bands. So both content book bands and also non-content book bands looking at what vendors can send books into prison where in all the different rules we see about what paper can be used, et cetera. We see censorship happening with whoever's in the mail room deciding that something, you know, checks a box that shouldn't get through. We see punitive action against people being put in solitary confinement for their writing or having their cells tossed or losing their job in the prison. So I think that we're now in a time in America where book bands are broadly happening across the board and freedom of expression is really a threat. But for many years before recent times, I would often think, you know, where is art still dangerous in America? And the answer was always in prisons because of this real sense and idea that, you know, the imagination certainly can't be policed, but what gets out into the outside world can and is and does. So I'll start us there. That brings to mind, Kate, in the book you edited, The Sentences That Create Us, there's a piece about, by Piper, Kerman, aren't just the new black. And I found it striking because it talks about the challenges about, you know, the number one adage for a writer is write what you know. And in prison, writing what you know can have severe consequences. So it's how do you write about the people around you without betraying them, without having your papers found and maybe sending them, getting them in trouble, or writing about your past affiliations or even present challenges, even if people writing about their own mental health can have their writing used against them in ways that people would cringe at in the outside world. And so I love that Piper was willing to be brave enough to dive into the hows and why's of how you answer that question for yourself as a writer. But I think, like Kate's mentioned, that self-censorship is how it works kind of in our country and in a more amplified way inside. I guess I can go next. So working with libraries, censorship is always a constant struggle because censorship is a fact of life in prison. There's certain things you're just never going to get. But even with that, there's no reasonable limits on it from what I've seen. And I wish there were because I see a lot of art books get censored, books about drawing the human figure get censored, anatomy books get censored, things that are have other value in them. And so as a librarian, it's my personal and professional ethic to not to not support censorship, to support freedom of speech and thought and people's access to information. But as a prison librarian, when I worked in a prison, I literally had to sit on the board and make decisions based on the written policy about what wouldn't get censored, which requires its own kind of creativity. I would say for people who are still in that kind of position where it's part of your job and it's always this balance that you have to strike between your personal and professional ethics and what is being asked of you as a person with no power, no power in the facility, except for maybe arranging books on the shelves that I could do for sure. And to close this out, as I said at the top, we're doing quite a bit of work looking into self-censorship, for example, as to how people learn in such an environment, how college professors teach in such an environment. But in terms of the issues that are really central to this conversation, thinking about creativity and free expression. Of course, this also is something that happens in a college classroom about people need to be able to pursue and explore ideas freely. That is what we associate and expect from a college level education. And to be able to do that, your instructor needs to be able to provide you with the resources to do that. You need to have access to the information to explore and take you where your curiosity leads you and investigate. And that's something that typically isn't often done in the college and prison classroom just because of the limited access to information. But it can be done with support of great librarians. There are students, people who published academic journals while they were incarcerated because there are people both inside and outside who are willing to supply them with the access to information that they needed. So there are ways of overcoming it and what you need to do to make that easier and find those ways and find those levers to increase access to allow people to explore wherever they're interested to take them. Thank you, Curtis, for that amazing setup for my next question, which is for you and Aaron. For both of you, your work is very much centered in access to information. And I'm wondering if you can share some information about how you've collaborated with people who are incarcerated, given all of these structures that can make it very difficult to do that. And if and how, let's say, you view your work as supporting people's creativity, which you've both already hinted that you do. Shall I take it first, Chris? Okay. So when you're on the inside, there's this drought of information and you can always see what you're doing. And you can see what you're doing. So it's important to be aware of what people are for knowledge, for input, for any kind of stimulation to keep themselves going and engaged with the world. And even with a really great library, which I think Colorado Department of Corrections has some really great libraries, a lot of, because of the work my predecessors and I think you can't go visit anytime you want to visit. You can't just hop on a computer and access the library system or any books you want to read the way you can on the outside. Or you may just be in a unit where you only get deliveries. And that's how your access happens. There are all these intense limitations, and I think that if people be self-directed and choose their own path, they always surprise me. And for interlibrary loan requests that we would place, I once had another librarian go, this is such an interesting assortment of books. Is this pretty normal? And it's like, yes. People, they want to do these deep dives into these topics that they're fascinated by. And I think that is what libraries are here for, is to help people choose their own path. And find their own interests, not a prescribed thing or a state mandated thing, but the thing that sparks for them and that they can talk to their families about and connect to others with as well. So that's the part that excites me about it. The other part of what our libraries do is we want to demonstrate how libraries can work for people who may not have visited their public library, so that when they get out, they're set up to take full advantage of those resources, not just to make things better when they're there, but when they get out too, because 97% of people who are incarcerated will get out. So that's the number. So that's something we always keep in mind that their path to reentry starts on the first day. So for our work, you know, we collaborate and work with, as a research organization, we do quite a bit of convening and bringing people together from different walks of life and different parts of this whole puzzle. So we do quite a bit of work with the college department to help with the connections and of course we engage with currently formerly incarcerated students in our work. We always have representatives from all these different constituencies and groups and perspectives on different parts, kinds of advisory boards. They are central in the research that we do, by informing that research and shaping that research. representation from people who have been incarcerated and other parts of the organization also, a lot of the work that's being done is being led by people who've experienced incarceration. So that kind of centering of those perspectives and that experience is really important for anyone who engages in this work, I would say. And especially because there are things you can know intellectually about how something works or how something is supposed to work on paper at least. And there's always that insight knowledge like, well, this couldn't happen because of X thing that you would never know about unless you had that direct experience. And so that's been extremely important for our ability to really understand the landscape and to shine light on some of the issues to make them more visible to a wide range of people in the public. In terms of supporting creativity, as I sort of already said, creativity, I think people don't necessarily think of education creativity as necessarily being in the same wheelhouse all the time unless it's maybe like a creative writing program or something, but of course, really the goal of any kind of college education should be to support someone's intellectual curiosity, their ability to think critically and to explore ideas and the boundaries of human knowledge. And that is something that we want to try to support through the work that we are doing at SNR in terms of thinking about censorship and self-censorship, access to information, technology and as complemented by the work my colleagues are doing at JSTOR in terms of making that resource available so that people can do these kinds of deep dives so that people have a resource and a robust resource to hand in a way that complements some other kinds of library access and other information access that they have. Thank you both so much. I'm going to pivot a little bit and thank you, Robbie, for setting up the pivot by mentioning sentences that create us and giving some background information on it. Kate, I just publishing a book that's written by currently and formerly incarcerated people. It seems like such an intimate connection between people who are not incarcerated who are working on that book and collaborating with people who are inside and like there's so many places where the communication can just fail or be cut off. I'm wondering if you can tell us a little more about the power of creating the sentences that create us and how it carries forward now that it's out in the world. Yeah, there's nothing more I love than to talk about this book. So thank you for the question, Jeannie. And so much of what Curtis and Aaron just said really resonate. I think it's really important to share that. This book was inspired by a resource that Penn America had put out long before I came into the program. Our program is five decades running. I've been running it for about five years. And the original handbook for Writers in Prison was the small guide to writing that was sent to thousands of writers a year and it was really became like a cult classic in prisons if I can say so. It was a resource I really admired when I taught writing in prisons before I came to Penn and I had the opportunity to really reimagine what this resource could be. And the first question was, how does this resource really serve people on the inside knowing all of these barriers that Curtis is talking about that you wouldn't know unless you're on the inside knowing that there's no internet like Aaron mentioned in prison. So what we would find and Robbie can attest to this is who's been along the full ride with me is that we would go through the mail stacks of mail that come in and start to notice that people didn't just want to understand what had to write a poem but how to live the life of a writer what does it actually mean? What were the opportunities? What were the options? There was a lot of also false belief that everybody was gonna be the next Stephen King or something when, as we know as writers and creatives on the outside that even the most famous writers usually have some other job happening. So there was this real opportunity to think about how we dispelled myths how we encouraged, how we inspired people how to make the book inspirational and aspirational and instructional all wrapped together and that meant going to the source going to people who lived the experience. So yes, it's full of people who are formerly and currently incarcerated. There's 50 contributors across the board. Most of those folks have justice involvement. And what can I say about working at the walls? I was the editor so it was really me working with individuals to piece together this collection and figure out how to shape it and what questions we wanted to answer that we saw routinely coming in. And I think one of the most interesting pieces of this that tags your question I think is how community echoes the book. People reference each other throughout the book. Nigel and Erlan are both interviewed in the book also in the journalism chapter from Ear Hustle. So that's a fun connection to bring full circle. But throughout the book people are referencing each other's classes, their instructors, other writers they've read. As I read through the final book, which is 350 pages I started to, I started to notice where there was already this underground community even outside of a scenario where it's disparate. There's no interconnection. People are in a prison in Washington but they've heard about somebody in DC who's been writing and here they are in the same book. So that was something that I thought was really powerful in terms of just looking at an underground artist community that somehow flourishes in the most removed and isolated and exile circumstances. There was something else I wanted to say, what was it that brought this point home? Oh, what we're doing with it now. I could talk about it for ages. So I don't want to go on too long, but please feel free to ask any more questions to guide me in a certain direction. But I will share that we were very lucky to get a Mellon grant to disseminate 75,000 copies of this book for free into prisons across the US. At this point we've disseminated about 38,000. So if you know of a classroom or an individual who might be interested in the book on writing from prison, Crafting the Writers' Life in Prison, you can request it right on this page that's being posted in the chat. And we are also building a curriculum around it to propel and develop self-directed writing groups in prisons across the US and not to own them as Pan America groups, but really to work with them as pilots to develop incarcerated leadership. So we're targeting programming deserts where there is not arts programming happening. So we start to infuse and build a language for a training kit for and some momentum for seeing people inside as being capable leaders themselves. I mean, it's just incredible. It's such an amazing revision of the work that Penn had already been doing. And I think it holds so much promise in multiple ways for people who encounter the book incarcerated in that. Also really glad that you mentioned this community of practice that forms, almost organically is not quite the word, but against many, many odds. And I know, Robbie, you are a major part of this community of practice that exists. You've been providing programs and hosting events related to the creative work of incarcerated people for a really long time. I mean, it's just incredibly impressive. And I'm wondering if you can share with us some of the joys and challenges of doing this work in your own experience. Yeah, that's a great question, Jeannie. I'm feeling every week that we do our work, we realize that self-care is a big part of it. People who work in and around the carceral state, whether you're on the prosecutor's side, whether you're the court clerk, whether you're a CEO, whether you're a formerly incarcerated person or a librarian who has to go in and out and kind of the alarms go off, everybody gets against a wall or you might, they're all experiencing some kind of secondary trauma or firsthand trauma in many cases. So what does it mean kind of to create in the face of the darkest parts of humanity? And so the joy and the beauty and the pain sit side by side almost at all costs. There is a remarkable whimsical delight I've noticed in the free world where you can choose to kind of actively ignore and create on a different level that isn't really connected to human concerns. So like I'm really into NFTs and some of the NFT art is like really abstract, high-level, you know, like a cutesy little thing that's just really cute and ephemeral and like doesn't really have a grounding. In fact, its distance from reality is kind of its selling point. But I think of when I think of the art that I see incarcerated people do, I used to design tattoos for people or like lots of the art that we see from Justice Arts Coalition, some of the stuff that you have a hand drawn with ballpoint pen on paper, like you can feel the craft in the thing, far cry from the AI art proliferating on the thing. It's like, where's the effort? A lot of people are crying out into the void, into our rapidly expanding digital universe. Anyway, so I think there is a joy in connecting to our humanity and the pain. I remember, and now I'm going, I've definitely gone on too long. I remember a workshop where a facilitator came in and was like, you know, we're going to be mindful, we're going to be present here right where we are. And I was like, please, could we question that approach? Like maybe we don't want to be mindful about stale meat number 19 and like, you know, like can we not, can I disassociate? Can I just disappear into my, you know, James Patterson novel? But in the act of the mindfulness came the raw material of creativity. And all the people who we celebrate out here for their writing, they're doing the act of work, of diving deep into that pain and coming out over and over again, they're mining their experiences and their observation and doing a great tribute to humanity by feeling deeply and putting it on paper or putting it into the world. Yeah, thank you. I'm always so impressed by the people we meet who are committed to their creative tech practice inside because it's not, no partial facility is designed to offer inspiration, you know. It's like, if you were in a hospital, but we're like, but there's nothing there that's like, you're going to feel great or like, here's a beautiful object that you look at unless you create the beautiful object or the room to imagine or the world building. You know, we've known some people who are writing like high level sci-fi, like how do you build an entire world that you have no access to and nothing around you begins to suggest that that world is possible? It's such a testament to the endurance of humans as artists and the kinds of social bonds that we build around communication. And I'm going to turn it back to libraries on this after that big setup, sorry, Erin. I'm interested in hearing how with your work in the Colorado DOC or alongside the Colorado DOC, you've been able to create kind of formal supports through the library, like library programs that make some of that room possible. Yeah, one thing I do want to add is that people who are incarcerated are creative and resourceful all the time without necessarily creating a work of art. Whenever we got called in to do cell searches on our day, you know, everybody goes and does cell searches even the library staff when you work in a prison, you know, you would find, you would see people like using dental floss to hang their washcloth because they don't have a place to hang that in their unit. They have to figure out how to do their phone call, ordering supplies on canteen, even getting access to the list can be a job that they have to complete. So there's a lot of creativity that they're already expressing and a lot of creativity that prison administrators are afraid of, like self-administered tattoos, which are a problem. You know, you don't really want that kind of art going on, please draw that but not on yourself. So I would always tell my library clerks, use your powers for good because I do think that they're powerful in that they are creative and resourceful people as anyone who has, you know, worked on the other side of it has discovered in some way, sometimes to your chagrin. So that said, what I really like and what I think is the coolest thing in the libraries that I work for and with is seeing when the people who are incarcerated are empowered to create their own programs. And there are some libraries that have been doing that for a while and it's awesome. So some of the programming D&D groups, which in some places are banned, which is silly because it's a great pro-social outlet for all that energy and excitement and to work together for some creative goal. We have one library that does language learning groups for Spanish and American Sign Language as well. There's tons of interest in learning other languages. So we are always providing those kinds of resources. We have like a Swahili audio book that was constantly on interlibrary alone. And we're like, maybe we should just buy this. People really wanna like learn while they're there and use their time well. One thing that a program close to my heart is something called Read to the Children, where family members and loved ones of children can read a book, record themselves reading it and then send the book and the recording home with them. And some of the libraries have setups where their library workers can edit the videos and they get really creative with that. They'll do like a scan of the page behind the reader or they'll do the text on the screen or they'll do fancy wipes and fades and they're learning the software just as much as they're creating this beautiful thing that a child will enjoy. And as we know from our data from the program, watch over and over and over again because their loved one is in there giving them a gift. So yeah, there's so many cool things I think I really like that classic expression. I don't remember where it comes from but nothing for us without us. And I think that's especially true of the way people on the outside or people who work on the inside as librarians can work with people who are incarcerated and support what they're already interested in. Thank you so much. Probably the end especially for the reminder of just surviving inside of a jail or a prison or a juvenile detention center, ICE detention requires a lot of creativity and a lot of resourcefulness. I am also thinking about the ways that there can be barriers in doing that working together especially around bringing new technologies that facilitate access into prison. And Curtis, I know that's something you've been working on with trying to figure out how can students have access to databases? What are some of the ways that you and other people at Ithaca SNR are thinking through or creating to begin to smooth the process of actually having people who are able to do their own research that requires technologies? All right, so I think I'll sort of back up first and just talk a little bit more about the role of technology generally in supporting educational access. It's sort of like the third rail of this topic and so far as both departments of corrections tend to not like technology as a security threat and the college programs themselves are a bit wary of technology for fear that it will encourage departments of corrections to eliminate in-person programming in favor of completely or entirely remote or virtual programming when it's widely understood that in-class in-person experiences is one of the most transformational aspects of getting that education especially in that space is the ability to be together in a room and talking about ideas. And so there's a real concern on both sides. However, it is also the case that you have a real equitable and quality college education. Today, you need to have access to technology. You need to be able to talk to your professors. You need to be able to enroll, which doing it pen and paper, like there's often not an option to do that anymore. And so colleges actually have to figure out other processes to enroll students or to apply for FAFSA, all these kinds of things are made much more difficult because of the lack of technology. So it's not just, so it's a broader problem and as Erin, I think sort of already said when people go home, they also need to be able to use technology. They need to be able to turn on their cell phones and turn on their computers and know how to go to find resources that will help them. And so this is a huge challenge in this space. Increasingly, we're seeing more and more technology come into the prison environment. One of the most important sort of watersheds was when the GED test went completely online, there was no longer a paper version of it. So that meant that prisons had, which typically have a mandate to support general education, had to figure out a way to make that available. So that was one turning point. What we're seeing now and what I see is a question in the chat in the Q and A is the question of tablets. The providers are certainly moving in as well, especially with the restoration of Pell funding. This is a major concern that, this is what college programming will be while just looking at videos on a tablet rather than being in the classroom and rather than having any kind of live or direct access to instructors or even peers. However, it's also the case that these things can be supports to education if used in that way and not to replace but to amplify. And so what my colleagues at JSTOR have been doing quite a bit of work on is thinking about different kinds of solutions to make their resources available. So the original solution also funded by the Mellon Foundation was an offline version of the JSTOR index. So it didn't have the full text articles, it just had the titles and the metadata and the abstracts and in cases where the articles had the abstracts. This was a very clunky process and so far as a student would have to look at the index, write out the title of an article that then we have to go back to the campus to be printed out and then be brought back in and this could take weeks to months in some cases by which point like your papers probably already passed due or you get the article and you realize it's not what you need, but still better than nothing. Now there's a couple of different things in the works. So one is a direct access solution for facilities that are experimenting with direct access. Colorado I believe is one of these states where they're piloting the direct access solution so students will be able to just go on to a version of JSTOR and just get access directly to articles without having this whole process. And then there's a more robust version of the offline index for those jurisdictions that are still not sort of thinking about giving people access to the internet. So there's a couple of different workarounds. Media review tends to be a pretty big sticking point because thinking about getting a few ILL books in is one thing, bringing in a corpus of millions of articles that cannot possibly be vetted by the person in the mailroom is a whole other problem. But of course these are critical resources that people need to have access to. And so figuring that out has been one of the big challenges as well. So part of it is the technology. The technology already exists. I mean, we know how to secure things if we need to. I think a bigger part of it is really just changing the culture of thinking around what access needs to be and what needs to happen within the jurisdictions. Yeah, thank you Curtis. And we have been in conversation in our department around the way that it's so easy for the big tablet companies to say we are providing access and maybe they're only providing access to open source materials or as an expose from, which means published before 1927. So I just invite you to consider the implications of publishing in that period and before or as the American Library Association revealed in their part and specifically Elden Reed James, some of them are providing access to books that they're charging people to read by the minute, sometimes up to five cents a minute for people who make $25 a month. I will, I'm gonna do like quick ear hustle throw in here, which I just love to recount as though I had some role in it. There's an episode of ear hustle that opens where Nigel and Erlen are talking and they're just kind of chatting and Erlen's like, oh yeah, I bought a book this month. And then Nigel's like, okay, cool. How much did the book cost? And he's like, oh, it was $25. And then she's like, oh, how much money did you make this month? And he's like, oh, it was $25, which is just such a testament to how people strive for, I mean, in that case, live an entire month for accessing one piece of information and just the profound longing that exists inside of institutions. And just I'll underline again that everyone in this room potentially has some role to play in beginning to push against that lack, including potentially by being a partner with the arts president. Yeah, I mean, I think just the other thing I would add to that is, we talk a lot about just like access, but of course not all access is created equal, right? And so, we need to think about what does quality access look like? How much time do people have with these resources, especially if they're on a tablet or a laptop? Do they just have the access to it for like an hour or do they have access to it around the clock, right? So what does that actually look like in terms of being able to access that resource? Is just because it's available doesn't necessarily mean that people actually can really engage with it in a substantive way. And so that's the other dimension to really dig down to, especially when it comes to the issue of technology. Totally. Thanks, Krita. Robbie, do you have something to reply to that? Are you just like, yes? Yes, yes, and yes. And I know we're on a tight timeframe, but I wanted to add to this access piece. I was thinking about, I have a bunch of friends who are trying to learn to be coders and like they're learning React and JavaScript and Node.js and Google Cloud computing. And they're like, have no way to practice it other than with their brains and paper. And I was thinking about in the context of Ear Hustle, access to that equipment is radical if you compare it to facilities all over the country right as of the last decade. But what's interesting, I had a chance to be an early reader for this book, Music Making in US Prisons. And I was thinking about how the culture that exists that Curtis was referring to this kind of like, please keep the technology out is a sort of really recent phenomenon in the 90s and in the 80s. Old timers will remember there was like much more flow inside, outside. There were people doing documentary films, locally learning filmmaking. There was like really a lot of new media when new media was still a term happening in prisons. And we've seen a divergence from that and kind of like a real clamping down on the ability of people to use technology tools specifically to tell stories. I'm thinking of the illicit cell phone that slides in and what a, you know, you could land in the box for a very long time for having a cell phone. And it's like, why is this more dangerous than other tools, you know? Anyway, also I was thinking, Penn America did a project a while back with a group in South America that were creating pinhole cameras. And so like the old school cameras and they had to slide the negative and they had these little boxes and they went around. It was in a women's prison and I think Buenos Aires and they were like, no, no, no, shut down. The pinhole camera program because people were documenting the abuses that were happening using these super slow, you know, developing negatives. Anyway, I just think about that in relationship to the power that being, having equipment and take access to technology represent. Yeah, completely. And I'm gonna step into my little academic role here. There's research that especially around cell phones just because you mentioned it and I'm not advocating for or against them by saying that it's just, this is the research that shows that the main reason that people get cell phones is not even necessarily to document the conditions in which they live, it's to maintain communication with their families on the outside. And the reason that the cell phones are so lucrative and market inside is also because these telecom companies are so expensive and phone calls are so regulated. We're getting off of our thing, but I'm really into it. What are you thinking, Erin? Yeah, and I do just wanna add that every time I've seen technology broken in the prison system, the way it's used is always to like when they figure out how to hide things deep inside the files and their education computers, the messages they passed were all like, hey, how's it going? Look what I can do, look how smart I am or to send each other love notes or dear John letters remotely, which is a little sadder. But yeah, it's always about connection in ways that scary for people who run prisons because we don't know that they're all gonna be that non-harmful, but usually that's what it's about. Yeah, I can just keep going on this, but I am gonna kind of steer us a little bit back towards creativity in part because Kate and Robbie, I really wanted to ask you this question, which might be too personal, so just step around it if it is. I'm so curious about how as creatives, you each bring yourselves into doing this work and how your own experience as a creative, which Kate, you touched on a little bit with the Stephen King idea, like what if it practically to be an entrepreneur, but how does your own experience with your creative work help you to think or move you through thinking about creativity for people who are incarcerated? I mean, I think that's a great question, Jeanine. It's certainly not too personal at all. I mean, I love talking about being an artist because I don't see much of a distinction. It's kind of like it's all art. This is kind of a grand art project that we're doing at Pin America as well. And I think that probably the most compelling and direct benefit of being an active writer, artist, visual artist outside of my job is that I bring that sensibility into the role. So one of the most exciting things about transitioning from teaching inside to working in this role and working with individuals through the mail, et cetera, was that I got to be a creative peer rather than a hierarchical instructor or somebody who had power over. And I think that that positions me as a collaborator. It positioned me as able to help legitimize writers that I was working with through the walls as being my creative peer versus a recipient of a service. And we get to have fun with it. I mean, I think that part of the biggest benefit, especially working with Robbie, is that we both have a real DIY approach. So we both are illustrators, we both are designers. So we decided we needed a print anthology for our 30 plus year running prison writing contest five years ago. And we had no funding for it. We had no money. And we just said, let's make it in house and do a print on demand. And Robbie designed the whole layout, which is now, we just went out our fifth anthology. We got Molly Crabb-Apple to do the cover. She volunteered her art. We got a bunch of illustrators to respond to the pieces in the book. And all of a sudden we had now a way for the folks in the book to understand what the heck it meant to win the Pentamerica Award because previously there was no context for them. They'd get money and they'd get a letter but what did it actually mean? Now there's a book where they can see their work among their peers' work. They can see it blurbed by professional award winning writers. And I think being able to bring artistic sensibility or even skill into the job is that we get to make things happen like out of thin air. That's a real beauty of that. And that's kind of a, maybe for prison, but also DIY punk rock ethic that we bring into the mix as well. And then you go and find the money for it. And we're still trying to figure that out if you know anybody. So it's going to be a slow burn, but I think it makes it really exciting. And as Robbie just said, you're underselling it to Robbie. This year we had a colleague, Malcolm, had a brilliant idea for stage every year award-winning work. This year was at the Brooklyn Public Library read by outside actors and authors. And we asked each of the incarcerated writers whose work was being featured. If they could have any scene that was on the screen behind the reader, what would it be? And Robbie gave me the great honor knowing that I like to sometimes not just write grants, but also design something. I got to put together the vision. So there's a real satisfying component to it that it helps the folks inside, but there's something really satisfying as a creative. And I think that artists have the potential to see new worlds. And that's really what we get to co-create together, I think. Robbie, please. I'd love to hear your answer as well. Oh, that's so exciting. It was real, there was a lot of energy behind that. We weren't sure we were going to get the answers back in time. We weren't sure whether people were going to get our letters, whether it was going to get caught in anyone in those censorship nets. And we had the idea last minute and we kind of threw it out there and got overwhelming response. I am in a weird position where we get a lot, we work with a lot of people at Penn and sort of my ethos is like if we're having fun and we're aligned, we're probably going to do better work. And especially in an arena that sucks joy and just wounds our souls, it really helps to charge it with creativity. And so I, creativity, I love what Erin said is like creativity is just not just creating product, that you deliver and put up on a shelf. And then the thing creativity has to do with like our orientation towards our environment and how we interact with each other. I think about theater exercise, I did a lot of theater in prison, but a lot of what makes actors really annoying is that they get very good at interactions and games and play and access to that. And if you think literally people will hire experts to come into their boardroom and executive corporate scenarios to loosen people up and get people thinking and brainstorming and acting. And so in that regard, I think infusing our everyday, you know, we do research, we do these massive reports, we do collaborations about people in prison all over the world. We're offering, you know, stuff about journalists who are being attacked on the job and people, it's hard. So I think everything we can do to like bring the humanity back, the joy back, please Lord, the curiosity, even in the dark, like what could happen? What could be a potential or possibility? And I know that's vague. I can think of a couple of ways this past breakout is one anthology is definitely another one, but also I'm thinking of partnerships and how we relate with the world around us. I think we've been, you know, approached it with a sandbox kids and I said, what could happen? And maybe we should, yes. Yeah, let's go ahead. And that feels like the spark of creativity is happening. Thank you both so much. I'm going to kind of close us out and there's room to go along or short depending on how you feel right now. I just touched on these two emergent themes in this conversation that I find so incredibly interesting, which are those partnerships and collaboration and then also the role of self-direction as people are creating in whatever manner inside. And so I open it to you all to answer or to highlight those or to go, to give some more depth to those and whichever you would like to focus on. I'll say just a few very brief things. On the topic of partnerships through the walls, I think that it's incredibly important for people to create community through the walls and something I'm really proud of at Penn that we've inherited as a mentor program, but we really started to change the definition of who is mentor and mentee. It really, we see it as a very reciprocal relationship. So I think there's a sense that people think I'm going to go help folks inside but really they end up getting so much in return. Creative community for any of us that create, we understand how deeply important it is to have people to pass your work by, to inspire you, to push you, to dream with you. And I think that at our best, what we do is really create connections to the wall and create community through the walls, you know, prisons are really good at keeping that divide up. So how can we facilitate and help people be in more connection community? And obviously on the outside, what that does is also create people who become sort of messengers for the cause, you know, so to speak. This is my friend, this is my collaborator, this is somebody I'll work with who happens to be in prison and what that does for the public narrative. And then I also say in terms of self-determination and self-direction, I mean, just in a space where people's rights are stripped down so profoundly as we've talked about tonight, how could you not want to do everything you could to allow people to have as much autonomy in their creative process as possible? Obviously that means providing tools and resources like any of us need and get value from. But I think the more that we see people as having inherent value and creativity, not that we need to give voice, but that we need to amplify voice or help people uncover voice. That I think is much more interesting to me conceptually and I think much more beneficial to folks, across the wall, you know, we all can benefit from that kind of a lens. For me, it really comes from looking at the civil rights era and looking at leadership that was really propelling self-determination and then applying that to this context as well. Maybe I'll just jump in. Earlier, Jeanne, you were talking about like it's amazing that creativity can happen and thrive in prison. And I kind of feel like if creativity is a substance and prison is a heavy object, it's basically just compressing this indomitable human feature and it has to come out in places. Like it is unavoidable. And the artists and creators that we see and respect and we label with self-determination are people who have learned to sustain themselves throughout their journey as releasing. Because everyone, it's coming out of everyone in all the ways, soap sculptures and, you know, things tacked on the wall and places that no one will ever, it comes out. But what we recognize is that people who learn how to do it in ways that have a give and take. I have a friend who's a real business person. They're always talking about signals. But that's really the thing that's missing when I create an isolation. The thing that comes out of it may not bear a relationship to the world. I may not even have the context to describe what it is I'm actually creating. One of my favorite books that someone gave me was a book on typology and the art of symbols. And as an artist, I was like, oh, there's meta language to wrap around, you know, the ideas that I'm holding on two levels up from where I've operated, you know? Like it's like, now I have more context and I have people who study philosophy and psychology and social psychology. And like they're learning the tools to describe their experiences. And that allows them to connect with a much, much broader world, which again gives them more signals back to their own artwork. And so when we're talking about like self-determination, like Kate said, it's really, really, really all about connection because I might, you know... Art in that siloed, hidden like insular thing becomes a weird thing. And it's much, much richer and enriching for everyone, I think, in connection. Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking so much, Robbie, as you're talking about the chapter in Nicole Fleetwood's book that is about kind of a society of artists who are all primarily self-taught and when they can't, when they chance to come into connection with one another, what they do is share what they have gleaned, you know? And they all have these incredibly different artistic styles and approaches, but they are, in that being in community, they're so much more affirmed as the artists that they are. And you can check it out from San Francisco Public Library, I just put the link in the chat if you're interested. It's a really incredible book. Curtis and Erin, do you have anything that you would like to add about collaboration or self-direction and curiosity? Yeah, so from my perspective with libraries, that's what we're here for is to help people indulge their curiosity and their self-direction. And now that we have a better library system, software, I can see what people are really interested in. And there's a lot of trivia books on that list or art books or books that stimulate people's minds or make them amaze true crime is a really popular genre. Because all of those things that they feed their souls, I think, in a way that's really positive. And the staff who work with them, if you are connected with any of them, tend to get really isolated. So the more they can be brought into community, the better it is for everybody. You need to recharge your batteries too if you're working in this environment. So I would say if you're a librarian and you offer things like interlibrary loan, that's awesome. That shows the people who work in those places that you care. And I've always had great relationships with those folks. So from the librarian perspective, that's what makes me happy and feel optimistic about things even when they are not perfect or great or anywhere near that. And from my perspective, I mean, collaboration, of course, is absolutely key to doing anything in this space. None of us can do anything without each other. Or, and of course, ultimately without the willingness grudgingly or no at the Department of Corrections. So getting all of these actors together and thinking about building something that works and is sustainable takes intense in collaboration. In terms of things like self-direction and curiosity, I think, you know, Kate and Robbie talked a little bit earlier at the top about these underground communities of creative practice. And we see this also in the post-secondary education space. You know, people, you know, they may be involved in a program, they may stay, start their own reading groups or, you know, San Quentin has like a Shakespeare group. You know, people will find ways to, you know, find ways to express their interests, especially what they're, you know, whether or not it's, you know, in a writing class or an arts class or in a college classroom. And certainly what we see in the college and higher education and prison space is that even if there's, you know, only five or seven people who are enrolled at that facility in the college classroom or maybe 12, you know, that material, that knowledge is being talked about on the yard is, you know, the articles are being shared, the readings are being shared. Other people are being encouraged to apply for the program, you know, the next semester. So these kinds of opportunities for self-directions, for curiosity, for people being able to show their curiosity and their interests and giving them ways to express that by taking these classes and things like that are ways of building community of learners and can be like really transformational for the facility itself. And this is something that we hear quite often from anecdotally, at least there's not, you know, really good research on this yet. Something that would be great, but is that, you know, these access to these kinds of things, access to college program, access to artistic program, creative writing theater, all these things, these are not like the threats to security. These are the things that build security and make, you know, a good environment for anyone. And so these are, we need to sort of, I think flip the logic of what we're doing here and that these are not the threats, like these are the things that are going to make these places better and safer for everyone. And so that is ultimately, I think, what we need to be doing in the future. Yeah, thank you. I love that as our note, as we move to Q and A of the fact that any people bring information in with them, right? And they share that information. They share their knowledge, their creativity, their passion and any piece of information, any program, any kind of any support that recognizes people inside as human is not just impacting the space in which it occurs, even if it's a letter between people, but has the possibility of transferring hand to hand or word of mouth throughout the prison. It's such a powerful message and also such a reminder that people truly do exist in networks of care while they are incarcerated and that anything that gets in is valuable, is cherished in a way that it gets polished as it is spread and becomes more and more refined. And especially when you start to think about people getting transferred from facilities, how that knowledge continues to carry forward over time. So really and in part because of the bare fact of incarceration, any information that's getting in just amplifies in ways that like you're saying the research isn't there, but might even be untraceable because they're so incredibly complex. And so again, I urge anyone who is watching this program or in this room to explore ways that you can support people who are incarcerated that might be through things like the Justice Arts Coalition Partners Project, which I posted earlier in the chat, or it might be by becoming someone's pen pal or it might be by donating to books that are on a wish list for a prison library or by working with a books to prisoners group which are all across the country. And they're groups that help to make sure that people who are incarcerated get access for free to at least some of the books that they're hoping to get their hands on. So please, if you are interested in hearing more about ways that you can support people who are incarcerated engaged with some of the other one city one book programs if you haven't reach out to us at San Francisco Public Libraries, jail and reentry services department or just do some quick searching and look at some of the resources that we've mentioned today in this program. And it looks like we're starting to get some questions and it's very exciting. I also think that the question that Curtis answered in the Q and A is interesting, maybe other folks might want answer to that question as well. There's a lot that could be said on that question. Yeah, I guess I can speak to Tony's question about the offerings in prisons and I can speak to Colorado that we've never fully recovered from COVID. And being locked down for two years with little to no access to their libraries because their staff were pulled away or to their families because visiting was shut down. Colorado's Department of Corrections is critically understaffed and about a quarter of the library positions are vacant. So that's kind of a bleak note. But with all that, the people who are there are still trying to provide opportunities for creativity. I know one of our highest security prison libraries is offering things like violence-free initiatives where the month without violence for people who sign up, which is a really big deal in those high security facilities, they get something like, they can participate in a program, they get a special treat, whether that like ice cream, I think was one month. So there's some things that they're trying to do to bring the humanity back and to get people engaged and then as well as all the things that the libraries are trying to do and trying to start again after the pandemic just wiped out a lot of what was happening that was going well. Yeah, and Kate's kind of addressed the question in the chat as well, but I'll add on, which is, as Kate's pointed out, prisons that are close to these urban areas like San Quentin or Singsing in New York is another good comparison. I mean, these ones that are easily accessible to the cities tend to have a lot more programming, there's just more interest, there's more people, it's easier. For example, in the college and prison, higher education and prison landscape, place like California, for example, there's a community college fair within hours or two driving distance. So there's quite a number of college programming in the California state prisons, at least at the community college level, doing it for a bachelor's level is gonna be much more difficult because there are much fewer universities that can provide that that are easily accessible, that are not gonna take like six hours of driving to get to the prison. So it's just simple geography can play a major role. I would say you can't find pockets of things in experimentation happening in some pretty unexpected places in this landscape. So for example, Tennessee, they just have like an internet, an open internet lab like in the prisons because the governor wanted it. And so they don't need all the grand funded things that JSTOR tried to do to get access, they can just like go onto the internet and get access to JSTOR. And so you'll find things happening in really unexpected places. And it's usually just because there's some, the governor wants something to happen or there's a warden who's willing to take risks or something like that. So it's an uneven landscape, but definitely the prisons that are near to major population centers are gonna have more programming. Yeah, and while it's very library centric because it's from a library, our Mellon Foundation funded work to identify where library services exist for people who are incarcerated is also hoping to begin to bring some of this information in about where programming exists, where funding exists, what kinds of books people are looking for. We've been for most of this year behind the scenes developing a map that will actually show where library services are. There are some barriers to people being allowed to talk to us, you can imagine. But we hope that once that map goes live, people are like, wow, really cool to show up on this map and we'll begin to populate it more. Especially, as I will not go too far as an aside, but as a precursor to this work, we were just cold calling prisons and asking to talk to their librarians and to speak to this kind of like, there's exemplar work happening and please refer you wouldn't expect it. We called a librarian in a prison in Idaho and she was like, how soon can you be here? I can't wait to show you my library and the programs that we're doing. You know, we're like, Nam, we're in California. But if we're able to bring those programs to light to show that they don't just happen in fact when the programming prison in the Bay Area, which has this kind of like liberal mythology to it, but are happening in Tennessee, are happening in Idaho, then I think we can begin to assuage some of the fears maybe that a DOC administration has about what is possible to do. Fingers crossed on that one. Should we move a little to the tablet question? What do you all think? It's a double-edged sword. I desperately want tablets, not prison paid tablets. I want iPads and mainstream kind of things that are real that people can really learn what they're gonna be using on the outside. But it's a struggle. Colorado has done tablets a couple of times and done like sweeping callbacks of every tablet because of hacking, you know? When somebody figures out how to break the device, then they just, you know, everything comes back. So if it was a case where they replaced physical things with those electronic things, they're just too easy to take away and really hard to return once that has happened. But in Colorado, we know the technology is inevitable and it's a pretty progressive state. And I do think we have leadership at the top who are really invested in getting technology in the hands of people and making sure that they're keeping up with what's going on on the outside so people can come out with real skills and resources when they're on the inside too. Thanks, Robbie. I love my librarians too. Yeah, I mean, so from our perspective, my colleagues at JSTOR, you know, this is at least, this is a huge question that we've been trying to wrestle with internally is, you know, putting JSTOR on the JPEG tablet has a potential to reach a lot of people, right? To us, it may feel a little icky to have to, you know, knowing the exploitation that happens through these platforms, but ultimately, you know, we want people to have access and we want to be guided by what people who are incarcerated want and, you know, it's very easy for us to hem and haw about the ethics of this when people inside are just like, I would like something, please, you know, because we have nothing. And so that I think is the attack that we're trying to take is trying to increase the amount of access as best we can in a way that is, feels morally supported to us, which is, I think, centering those voices ultimately. Yeah, I mean, I do, sorry, Robbie, then you can go before me if you want. Okay, I do feel a lot of concerns around surveillance and the capacity that is the potential that's there, whether or not the AI and machine learning actually gets up to it, who knows, but that's how a lot of the devices are advertised and I read, I did, I'm a regular academic, I did a project where I just looked at patents that the major tablet companies were putting out, so not necessarily what they were doing but what they aspire to do. And for instance, one of them was like a music creation software that wouldn't allow anybody to say cuss words or other prohibited words. So ostensibly, it was because people might say, I think that's related to being affiliated with a gang in the patent, but it was very much like, what if they say a four letter word? And realistically, people who are in a prison as many adults in the United States know cuss words and use them, and so like people who are creating music in their cell could have the lyrics that would then be prohibited through the software. So this kind of complexity, this additional surveillance and censorship comes up. That being said, I'm gonna just tease or watch this space with San Francisco Public Library because we're on, we believe that we're on the cusp of doing something that might be really innovative around access and tablets. And if we fail, I don't wanna tell you what it is. But we're really excited about what we're moving forward with here and hoping that we're gonna be creating a model for successfully facilitating some access. Yeah, thank you, Janie. I just wanted to add that in 2019, Penn released the literature locked up report and part of it was like the beginnings of processing what's happening with tablets. And then we have a coalition of people, librarians and books through higher education people talking about tablets. Most recently we had a fellow developing a report using anecdotal evidence and like some research from third parties, people like Worth Rises who track prison profiteering and like, what will it mean the day the last physical book gets mailed into a prison? And that's the framing of his research which is still yet unreleased. But I think about ongoing work right now that we're looking at in New York City where they had one brand of tablets that had free to access information that recently got replaced with Securus. And like, what does this fight look like when as one colleague puts it, people are essentially being commodified to have fun and siphon from their families and from their lives. And so I think the tablet issue is it's a reflection of what's happening in society with our scrolling, eye-tracking and habits. It represents kind of like the same a mirrored effect on the inside where people's buying habits, people buy those electronic stamps, people buy the little electronic greeting cards to send to the family. A chintzy little gift that goes like this will be $5 to send that to your aunt on her birthday from the inside. And so like these are insidious practices. Access to funds and funds transfer get like marked up. And like, so it's like, yes. Every person inside I've ever spoken to is like, please I want a tablet. Although there are some people who are like, please make sure you keep my physical books. Don't even play games. But the price is really, really high and there's very little oversight. So I think tablets are the big issue and will continue to be for another, for a long little while. And I would add that with digital rights management and the proprietary software on those tablets that people can spend thousands of dollars on movies or books and not be able to use them once they get out. Which is, we all know that when we're stymied by digital rights management but it's even worse because it's intentionally not compatible with anything else. Or when the tablets get recalled or they go with another vendor, right? So yeah. So tricky. And I think, I mean, I agree, Robbie it really is the pressing issue of our time in this space and not necessarily because any of us willed it to be. But we're all kind of in the mix of figuring out this very rapidly developing terrain. Yeah, and I think that's right. Libraries need to be at the front of it because we're all about providing things at no cost. And if we start it that way, maybe we can undermine some of that. Profiteering that happens, it's our hope. And Nisa, have we missed any questions? I haven't been completely up in the chat. I think you are good, you're solid. I would say final words from any of you would be about that time. I'll open final words by just saying thank you all. It's amazing to share this space with you and we're so happy at San Francisco Public Library to be able to provide you with this platform and to learn from you and your expertise. And I just, I thank you for closing out our One City One Book Program for this year and for your ongoing work. I hope that everyone who's able to attend or able to do this continues to follow what you're doing because it's just going, it has been incredible. And I know that that trend is going to continue. I also just wanted to say a thank you as well, especially to Eugenie and to our co-panelists tonight. It's really good to be in community with people who feel the same way we do and get to share ideas. So it adds fuel to the fire. Likewise, I feel a little bit extra softness. Very grateful to be here and share this space. The people inside don't necessarily get to see and talk to all the people. So frankly, then they don't know that there's a Zoom happening where attendees are watching because they care about creativity of people inside and how to support that. There's no way for them to know, you know what I mean? Like we said, there's no access, but I am feeling all the gratefulness that somebody in a cell would feel for all of the people here, for all the people in attendance and watching and listening, just because it does have an impact to the things that you do and choose. And when you do go search out the links that Jeannie mentioned earlier, how you can get involved and whether you feel like, oh, maybe there's something I can do. I can tell you that it does make a difference. It feels a little bit like a Jerry Lewis plea at this point. But I really, really want to say that everything we can do to reach out and support healthy creativity. Even like the get rich or die trying people who are like, I'm gonna make a million dollars with my patent that my game board design, my book that I'm writing is gonna make me a millionaire. But like that's the dream that fuels a lot of people to keep searching and if you can channel that, it can be great. Yeah, I'll give them a book on tiny home building or finances, because everybody's really interested in that they all want to be the next Elon Musk. So yeah, thank you all for attending and hanging around and this like refills my bucket quite a bit to see what other people are doing and to talk about some of these good things. I think it's so important because it's so easy to get focused on the dark stuff and people are people no matter where they are, no matter where we try to put them, they're gonna surprise us and do unexpected things. And sometimes it's really great. So thank you all. And I have nothing much more to add other than to thank all my co-panelists and everyone for attending. I think it's, as everyone has said, it's always amazing to talk and share because we all encounter different parts of this issue of these issues and all bring our different perspectives and experiences to it. And so just the ability to share knowledge and to spread the word I think is so important and couldn't imagine doing it with a better group of people. And thank you also to Jeanie for organizing as well. Yes, thank you all for really rounding out this last One City One Book event and your inspiration and your excitement is like totally contagious. I thank you all for doing this. Jeanie, as always, thank you in library community. The biggest thank you to you for being part of this and listening and being such an engaged crowd. Go to bed everybody, go to bed. Thank you.