Chapel Hill Prison Books Collective Year End Report

December 29, 2010

Dear Friends and Comrades,
This poster marks a year of making these posters! Our collective is super excited to be able to have kept up for an entire year while expanding what we are pretty sure is the most extensive database of US political Prisoners’ birthdays. We plan on continuing to compile these birthdays and addresses for years to come. What started as a really shitty looking punk poster sent to 20 personal contacts in the south east is now emailed out to over 200 infoshops and individuals, mailed to just about every books 2 prisoners in the country and 500 are included in every package of three major radical distributors. Its also changed the way the Earth First! Journal does their prisoner support page. It is our hope that all this has increased political prisoner mail and support exponentially by using a decentralized yet coordinated model. This project serves to connect the current movements and struggles with our warriors and elders who have been captured and in many cases tortured and left to be forgotten by the US empire. Most signs point to this project as a raging success in terms of its original scope and goals. It would have never been possible with out the Anarchist Black Cross Federation for their original birthday list and Denver Anarchist Black Cross for keeping up with the ever changing addresses of US political Prisoners. We now have pdfs of almost all of the posters so far (except february 2010) on our recently overhauled website prisonbooks.info. So feel free to point people towards that piece of
Cyberia.

Which brings us to money, The past year of this project was financed entirely out of pocket and cost us hundreds of dollars over the course of a year stupidly enough. The prison books aspect of our project doesn’t have the money to spend on this and send thousands of books each year to prisoners in the south, so basically we’ve been spending our own very tight personal finances. So we’re asking y’all to throw a bit of money our way. You can donate through our website (prisonbooks.info)or send checks to Internationalist books to prisoners at our bookstore’s address.(405 w franklin st, chapel hill nc 27516) If you have a local books to prisoners project or Anarchist Black Cross then ignore our plea for money and read it as a plea for support for them. Make copies, volunteer, give money, whatever you’re able to do. Prisons are a strategic point of struggle and the books 2 prisoners network is a potentially powerful force for positive and radical social change. As always…please post this poster publicly and or use it to have a card writing night.

Until Every Cage Is Empty,
for the chapel hill prison books collective,
ppbirthday@riseup.net