Award-Winning Book Reveals Why Books Are Important For Incarcerated Appalachians

This conversation originally aired in the May 25, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

The book, titled This Book is Free and Yours to Keep, won the 2024 Weatherford Award for nonfiction. It consists largely of letters from incarcerated people across the region who have participated with the Appalachian Prison Book Project. 

Ellen Skirvin is one of the book’s editors and spoke with Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams about the Appalachian Prison Book Project — and how it became a book itself.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Adams: I’d like to hear more about the Appalachian Prison Book Project. What do y’all do? How many folks do you work with? Where are folks located?

Skirvin: APBP is a volunteer driven nonprofit organization based in Morgantown, West Virginia. We send free books and provide educational opportunities to people incarcerated in prisons and jails across Appalachia, serving six states: Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Maryland. We respond to about 200 letters a week, so that gives you an idea of how many people we work with and serve. Since APBP was founded in 2004, we’ve mailed over 70,000 books to people in prison. We also create opportunities for volunteers and members in the Appalachian community to learn more about the legal justice and prison systems in the U.S. In short, our mission is to challenge mass incarceration through books, education and community engagement.

Adams: Why is it so important for people in prison to have access to books and particularly beyond just the libraries that are available in those prisons?

Skirvin: Education, literature and access to books: these are human rights, which means everyone should have access to them, and our goal is to provide these rights to people behind bars who have historically not had access to them or have very little access to them. While some prisons and jails might have libraries, sometimes they can be very sparse. We also know that books change people’s perspectives, hearts and lives, and many of the volunteers who first become involved with APBP come to it because they also have a love of reading. Many English professors from West Virginia University, as well as students and just community members, come to APBP because of a love of reading, and wanting to share that and connect with people over that love of reading. We’ve seen the power of reading firsthand. We’ve seen time and time again that books and education are lifelines to people in prison and jail, and people ask for books to help them pass the time, to help them learn something new, to help them understand the legal system and their own court case, to help them prepare for life outside of prison, and to even try to build a life inside.

Adams: How did the project get started? What led to its launch, and how did you all grow to where you’re at now?

Skirvin: The idea for APBP began in 2004. Katy Ryan, who is an English professor at West Virginia University, taught a prison studies graduate course, and through the readings, students were really struck by the continuous mention of books as a source of power and freedom for people inside. Katy had mentioned the lack of organizations that sent free books to people incarcerated in the Appalachian region to the students, and this led the class to want to really do something about it. None of them had volunteered at a prison book project before or even knew how to start an organization like that, but they tapped into the surrounding community for help, involving Morgantown locals and university members collecting paperbacks and fundraising. Even after that prison studies class ended, and some of the students had to leave and they graduated, the effort still continued, and more people became involved.

We were given a donated workspace inside the Aull Center, which is a 100-year-old building that houses the local library’s genealogy records in Morgantown. After two years of preparation, we finally sent our first book to a person in prison. We continue to grow and learn from other prison book projects, and we also facilitate book clubs inside prisons, and have grown to be able to also offer educational scholarships to people recently released. We also support college classes in prison, including assisting an associate’s degree program through West Virginia University’s higher education prison initiative.

Adams: You all also have published your own book, titled This Book is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project. How did this book come about? How did you all go from providing books to making a book yourself?

Skirvin: Other prison book projects have done a wonderful job of documenting this type of work. A Seattle prison book project also came out with a book. Another book was Books through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement, which includes stories from people in all different book projects across the country. We also felt it was important to document the history of this work, and particularly in Appalachia. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve sent tens of thousands of books, which means we had tens of thousands of letters. So many of the letters really moved us, whether someone was writing about a book that they really connected with, that we connected with a book series that they love, or a book that helped them with a court case. But people didn’t only just talk about books or request a book. They often, in their letters, told stories about their lives and their loved ones and their dreams, or a funny story from their childhood or devastating stories, or stories about the lack of access to books inside. We felt like this was a really unique opportunity to not only document the work of APBP, but also to have a space to show this range of writing and experience captured in these letters. When we finally set out to start this book back in 2018, we had many volunteers get involved in selecting potential letters and artwork for the book — going through those many, many letters that I talked about — then we set out to get permission from some of the people who wrote to us and also gave us artwork too. Many times there’s artwork included on the envelopes that are sent to us. We told them about our goal for creating this book, and our hope to publish their work and hope to have permission from them. Ultimately, we received permission from 80 incarcerated people to incorporate their writing in the book, and over a dozen permissions to include artwork that they had sent to us. It took a lot of help from the community to kind of get all of these letters together, as well as gain that permission and put this book together. So it’s really been a community project.

Adams: One part of this book includes samples of letters from people requesting specific books, and that’s a pretty broad range of stuff. What tends to stand out to you in terms of book requests? What do you all have that tends to be the most requested? What are some of the more surprising requests you received over the years?

Skirvin: By far, the most requested book is a dictionary, and about one in six books we send is a reference book, like a dictionary or encyclopedia or almanac, and that’s mainly because people in prison don’t have access, or have very little access, to the internet. We take that for granted on the outside. If we are writing something, then spellcheck can help us spell a word, or if in important documents or just in communication with a friend, we don’t know what a word means we can easily look that up. But people on the inside can’t really do that, and people on the inside often talk about dictionaries as the “prison internet,” and how-to books about starting a business, working with cars, legal primers, dictionaries in different languages. All those are important in prisons. We get so many requests for dictionaries that, once one is donated, it really just flies off the shelf and goes right into the mail. Other than that, we get a lot of requests for contemporary fiction, popular mystery, sci fi novels. All these books are really popular on the inside. I know I had seen requests for training dogs, which I was surprised by at first, but then, after receiving more letters, realized that there were programs for training dogs inside the prison, and the people inside wanted to do a better job at that training, and that’s why they were asking for those books.

Adams: Where does the Appalachian Prison Book Project go from here? What constitutes success for the Appalachian Prison Book Project?

Skirvin: Every time we get a book into the hands of someone who wants to read it is a good day, in my opinion. When we are finally allowed to send books to a prison or jail that maybe wouldn’t let us before, that’s always a good thing, too. When people write back to us saying they enjoyed the book we sent them, or that they learned something new, that’s always a success. We want to continue to grow, of course, and continue to support college education inside and also for those recently released. So more than books, but educational support too.

Ellen Skirvin is one of the editors of This Book is Free and Yours to Keep. It’s available from West Virginia University Press.