This conversation centers the voices of currently incarcerated artists with firsthand accounts of the challenges of incarceration during a pandemic. Amid a shifting policy landscape, with groundbreaking advocacy leading to large releases of prisoners, Playwright Cori Thomas (Lockdown) and formerly incarcerated teaching artist Robert Pollock discuss the responses to pandemic on the inside and out.

CORI THOMAS (Playwright) is the daughter of former Liberian Ambassador, David Thomas and Brazilian attorney, Zuleika Thomas. Her plays include When January Feels Like Summer (NYT Critics Pick), directed in NYC by Daniella Topol, produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre with P73, and then re-mounted with Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Women’s Project, with other productions at City Theatre (Pittsburgh) and Mosaic Theatre (DC). Her other plays include: Pa’s Hat (Pillsbury House), Flight 109, My Secret Language of Wishes (Mixed Blood), and her work has been developed at Sundance, Goodman, Playwrights Horizons, Pillsbury House, Black Rep, New Black Theatre, among others. She is a member of New Dramatists, and is a writer on an original series for Audible.com and is currently writing a screenplay about Nelson Mandela for HBO Films.

ROBERT POLLACK is PEN America’s Prison Writing Program Manager. For over a decade, he has worked with the justice system and its intersection with the arts. He is an ongoing participant in Rehabilitation Through the Arts, Musicambia, Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, and Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections Advisory Committee. He has collaborated with the Fortune Society, Osborne Association, and several NYC grassroots organizations. He has participated in workshops and panels at Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Yale, and other universities to advocate for the power of the arts in prison education and restorative justice practices. As a visual artist, he illustrated the picture book for children of incarcerated parents, Sing Sing Midnight, which is used in therapeutic settings around the country. As a singer-songwriter, his compositions have been heard at the Obama White House, the RFK Human Rights Foundation, Create Justice forums, the Vera Institute of Justice Gala, the New York Ethical Society, and Carnegie Hall. Robert is a Fall 2019 New York Community Trust Leadership Fellow.