After Violence Project

🗯️ “Nearly everyone became engaged in discussing how the documents assigned to us act as another form of confinement.”

📝 AVP Documentation and Archives Intern Sam Carter shares her reflections from her first writing workshop at the Travis County Correctional Complex alongside Community Archives Manager Raquel Garcia.

From navigating the facility's bureaucratic maze to witnessing erasure poetry come alive in the hands of workshop participants, Sam offers a first person account of what AVP memory work looks like across prison walls.

🔗 Read the full article: https://tinyurl.com/4a5ewtwv

💻 The risks associated with maintaining a repository of information are daunting for even well-funded institutions. Small organizations with limited resources are presented with the same basic challenges, which are then compounded by the impact of those same limitations.

Join us for Risk and Protection for Community Archives with Michael Kanin, AVP’s very own Associate Director of Advancement and Operations

This course will first open a dialog about the risks faced by participants’ organizations, then work to create a series of virtual workshops informed by participants’ experiences and needs.

📅 Dates: October 22 – November 12, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Thursdays, 5:30-7:00 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School, a continuing education program hosted by the After Violence Project.

🔗 Learn more and enroll here: https://tinyurl.com/wh5tc4dh

💫 Shoutout to AVP’s VAV Fellow Alumni Starr Davis and her latest poetry publication with Hanging Loose press, entitled Affidavit!

"Affidavit captures the passionate intensity of motherhood and custody battles within the constraining shape of bureaucratic legal forms. Presenting us with the horrors of incarceration and the wonders of birth, these poems testify to the power of parental love even amidst the suffocating apparatuses of the courtroom.”

Learn more about her publication: https://www.hangingloosepress.com/book/affidavit/

💸 Community memory work deserves to be resourced and sustainable. In the current landscape of defunding and uncertainty, that means getting creative with earned revenue.

Join us for Exploring Earned Revenue for Community Archives with Gabriel Solís, AVP’s very own Executive Director.

Based on learnings from AVP’s mission and values aligned earned revenue program, this course introduces participants to earned revenue as a key element in development strategies for financial sustainability.

📅 Dates: October 20, 2026 – November 10, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Tuesdays, 2:00-3:30 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School.

🔗 Learn more and enroll: https://tinyurl.com/3b8vakmc

📕 New Book: Harm and Punishment

We are thrilled to uplift this landmark anthology drawn from AVP organizational partner, the American Prison Writing Archive. Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison centers essays by incarcerated writers tracing how violence shapes lives before, during, and after incarceration - rooted in historical trauma, systemic inequity, and cycles of deprivation.

A powerful testament to what publications becomes possible when we commit to archiving and preserving incarcerated people's voices.

Learn more:

Harm and Punishment Haymarket Books: books for changing the world.

✏️ How does pedagogy inform your work? How can your practice be an extension of your values?

Join us for Pedagogy as Practice with Murphy Anne Carter, AVP’s very own Community Programs Director.

In this collaborative, discussion-based course, students will contemplate: what pedagogy is and how it can support project design, knowledge-sharing and creation, as well as reflection in community work. This class is for questions, ideas, co-creation, learning, and unlearning. Participation – in all of its forms – is expected.

📅 Dates: October 21 – November 11, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Wednesdays, 6:00-7:30 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School, a continuing education program hosted by the After Violence Project.

🔗 Learn more: https://tinyurl.com/msnkd9dw

🗃️ New in the Archive: Interview with Atma Meek

In February, AVP Community Archives Manager Raquel Garcia sat down with Atma Meek, a system-impacted abolitionist, advocate, and father who spent 26 years incarcerated. He speaks on the many phases of accountability - internal and external, personal and collective - and the conditions and resources needed to repair and rebuild one's life after incarceration.

Currently, Meek is a recognized advocate for restorative reentry practices and housing resources and currently works with The Other Ones Foundation.

🔗 Listen to the full interview: https://bit.ly/4xaYDBg

🫂 Content Warning: this interview discusses violence, su***de, and death.

🍎 Our first course of the season!

Join us for Storytelling through the Archives with Raquel Garcia, AVP’s very own Community Archives Manager.

The four-week class will approach archival studies through the lens of deconstruction, reflection, and reinvention. Students are encouraged to break down concepts and definitions rooted in academia, reflect on such topics to explore new possibilities, opportunities, or challenges posed to ultimately apply archival concepts in creative and inclusive ways.

📅 Dates: October 19 – November 9, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Mondays, 6:30-8:00 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School, a continuing education program hosted by the After Violence Project.

🔗Learn more: https://bit.ly/465IUs8

Thank you for your annual event, Night Out for Safety and Liberation! We are thankful to be in community with you. 🦋

Last month in Austin, AVP’s Documentation and Archives team got to table at the event and connect with people from all walks of life. We are incredibly grateful for the folks who shared their stories and wishes for the future, and also for the space to spend time with our community.

Want to stay in touch with upcoming events and reflections on AVP’s storytelling and archiving work? Make sure to sign up for our newsletter. Our next one features a deep dive on our latest memory workshop inside Travis County Correctional. Don’t miss it.

🔗Sign up: https://bit.ly/4zUVXtQ

Our Community School is here! Four courses, taught by AVP’s very own staff, on what it takes to steward community archives:

🗄️ Storytelling through the Archive
💸 Exploring Earned Revenue for Community Archives
🍎 Pedagogy as Practice
💻 Risk & Protection for Community Archives

Classes begin the week of 10/19. Sign up today to secure your spot.

🚌 What’s Community School? AVP’s continuing education initiative offering courses on the practices of stewarding community archives. Stewarding collective memory well takes a range of skills, and no one person has them all, so we share insights as an organization nearly two decades deep into this work. Instructors draw on interdisciplinary approaches and lived experience as practitioners, who have worked under changing conditions in community-sensitive environments.

💰 Want to support? Consider donating toward student gift cards to support students who can’t otherwise attend.

🔗 Learn more and enroll: afterviolenceproject.org/community-school