Ilan Stavans on Teaching Shakespeare Behind Bars

At the Hampshire County Jail and House of Correction, nine inmates are taking a class on Shakespeare, alongside a few students from Amherst College. The class, taught by Restless Books publisher and Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans, is part of the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program and includes students from inside and outside the prison studying and learning together.

The classes give a few select inmates a chance to earn college credit and begin rebuilding their post-incarceration lives, and it also exposes the college students to a different view of life.

Stavans, whose belief in the enduring power of classic literature is evident in our line of Restless Classics, teaches some of Shakespeare’s most iconic  works, including Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet—plays that many would argue are not easily accessible in today’s world. Stavans believes, however, that Shakespeare is actually very simple to understand, no matter your background, education, or life experiences.

“[It]’s all about life,” Stavans said. “He has a lot to teach us about living. We can all learn from him.”

To encourage the most personal and honest responses from his students, Stavans allows them to respond in whatever form feels the most comfortable, whether that is poetry or a short story or an essay. His approach seems to be working. Many of his “inside” students have connected to Shakespeare’s works in a deeply personal and heartfelt way, and have been able to share that connection with the rest of the class.  

“I feel the same way Macbeth felt,” said Wolf, an “inside” student, during a classroom discussion. He shared how he had been torn apart by the death of his young son. In studying Macbeth, he was able to empathize with the characters, because he understood how “one thing in your life can be the seed of your destruction.”

Learn more about Stavans’ work with the program in a feature from The Daily Hampshire Gazette.

New Deadline for the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing

Dear writers, readers, agents, editors, and literary citizens: The deadline for the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing has been extended by one month, until March 31, 2018. Please spread the word to any first-generation, first-time writers in your circles! For this year's Prize, Restless is offering $10,000 and publication to a debut book-length work of fiction by a first-generation immigrant of any country. We're looking for groundbreaking, extraordinary fiction that grapples with the realities of immigration, migration, and the complexities of our ever-changing world. The first winner of the fiction prize was Deepak Unnikrishnan for his novel Temporary People, which won the Hindu Prize, was nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a best book of 2017 by San Francisco Chronicle and Kirkus. We can't wait to publish the next great immigrant fiction debut!

Meet the 2018 Immigrant Writing Prize Judges

Téa Obreht's debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist and a New York Timesbestseller.  Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York and teaches at Hunter College.

Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."