Jonathan Rajewski is an artist and writer. In 2013, Rajewski co-founded the Hamtramck Free School, an alternative, rhizomatic educational organismization that facilitates creative writing and visual art workshops in Michigan prisons, working closely with juveniles who were sentenced to mandatory life without parole, a sentence that is now unconstitutional. In 2021, Rajewski published How to Start a Writing Workshop (Free School Press), a manual co-constructed with incarcerated poets, artists and activists throughout the United States in response to the precarity of educational programming inside prisons and with the aim of supporting the emergence of autonomous creative writing workshops without permission and without state approval. In 2022, his essay on liberatory pedagogical practices, within and without the studio and classroom, was published in Wreck After Wreck: 5 Years of Critical Practice at Yale School of Art, 2016–2020 (Yale University, 2022). He is a 2015 Kresge Fellow in Visual Art, a 2021 Critical Practice Research Grantee from the Yale School of Art, a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, and a 2024 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Resident. He lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.

Kyle Daniel-Bey is a writer, artist, co-organizer of the Hamtramck Free School and a former juvenile lifer and member of the Writer’s Block at the Macomb Correctional Facility. His work has appeared in Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), The Washington Square Review (New York University Press, 2015), and numerous poetry anthologies organized by the Prison Creative Arts Program at the University of Michigan. In 2021, Daniel-Bey, together with Jonathan Rajewski, published How to Start a Writing Workshop (Free School Press, 2022), a manual co-constructed with incarcerated poets, artists and activists throughout the United States in response to the precarity of educational programming inside prisons and with the aim of supporting the emergence of autonomous creative writing workshops without permission and without state approval. He has exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the College for Creative Studies, and the University of Michigan, among others. He has been a guest speaker at the Yale School of Art, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. He won a 2024 Creative Capital Award. Daniel-Bey received an Associates Degree from Wayne County Community College and is a Journeyman Ironworker in the Ironworkers Union Local 25. He lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.