Biography
Zeke Caligiuri (he/they) is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am, published by University of Minnesota Press, a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Caligiuri has won multiple awards through the PEN Prison Writing Contest and is the cofounder of the Stillwater Writers Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country.
He is a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison as well as School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Pushout and Mass Incarceration. He is an editor and contributor to the recent anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023). Caligiuri’s fiction was anthologized in Prison Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
As an incarcerated writer, his work has been widely published in journals and anthologies for years. He is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and now does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center and is helping to build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition, empowering system-impacted people and reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.
