Emerge: Art for Justice

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Welcome to Emerge, an online tool that enables you to make, save, and send erasure poems—only instead of striking through text you will select words, which are then surfaced. Emerge was developed by the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. The source texts below are presented by the University of Arizona Poetry Center and are representative examples of legislation and policies that have directly impacted incarceration rates in the United States, which disproportionately affect people of color. These texts were chosen in consultation with The Sentencing Project and The Marshall Project. We encourage you to use Emerge to think about incarceration in the United States. Much of the language collected in these texts has imagined whole groups of people in particular, defined ways. Can you use this tool to imagine differently?

Emerge: Art for Justice

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