Coffee With The Authors: Janie Paul

Coffee With The Authors is a series of conversational interviews with local, regional, and state authors about the art, craft, and process of writing. GAAC Gallery Manager Sarah Bearup-Neal talks with writers — poets, essayists, memoirists, fiction writers, historical fiction writers, writers of creative non-fiction – and explores how a writer works and thinks.

Building An Escape

Janie Paul, co-founder of the Prisons Creative Art Project, published Making Art In Prisons, and received a 2024 Michigan Notable Books award. This book details a project that brings visual art practice to incarcerated people, inserting creative work into a dismal, spirit-flattening environment, which “upend[s] the manufactured stereotypes of those living in prison, imparting a real human dimension — a critical step in the movement to end mass incarceration.” Paul teaches at the University of Michigan.

The video interview will become available below on October 1, 2025.

Many thanks to the Cottage Book Shop and the Glen Lake Community Library for their support of Coffee With The Authors.