Homewood Nation

Award winnning novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman will be at Duquesne University this afternoon for a panel discussion on a program that has created a think tank in which prisoners collaborate with those outside to study issues of common concern.

The program, Inside-Out, began at Temple University in 1997. Ten years later, Dr. Norm Conti, an associate professor in Duquesne's Department of Sociology and the Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy, established it here, partnering Duquesne students with inmates at SCI Pittsubrgh.

Wideman’s brother, Robert, who is the subject of the award-winning 1984 book Brothers and Keepers, has taken three Inside-Out classes while incarcerated and is a founding member of the think tank. John Edgar Wideman, professor of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown University, will deliver "Brothers and Keepers 30 Years Later: A Reading," based on his 1984 memoir about his brother's arrest, trial and imprisonment, at 4 p.m. in the Africa Room. He will then participate in a 5 p.m. panel, titled "Think Tanks as Mechanisms for Social Justice," with Dr. Tony Gaskew, director of the criminal justice program and associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Pittsburgh-Bradford, and rapper-activist Jasiri Xl. Moderator will be Lenny McAllister, host of PCNC-TV’s NightTalk.

The program is free and open to the public.

For more about Inside-Out, view the Spring 2011 issue of Duquesne University Magazine.