History

Writer’s Bloc literary journal was started by Rahul Desai (’10) and Julia Woodward (’10) – both Teaching Assistants for the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP), with the intent of providing CPEP students with an outlet for their talents and the campus population a lens to their counterparts’ vision and abilities. They begun the literary journal with this fundamental idea: writing is an outlet and it is a deeply personal expression of self, and as such, it should be given an opportunity to be heard.

The first volume of Writer’s Bloc was published during the 2009-10 academic year. Rahul Desai and Esther Kwan (’11) donated the proceeds of their winning Cornell’s Robinson-Appel Humanitarian Award to continue publication of Writer’s Bloc 2010-2011.

From the Writer’s Bloc website of 2011:
We hope that the Writer’s Bloc literary journal will be a platform for the Auburn students to tell their stories to their audience. It is our hope that reading the work that is included in these publications will be a chapter of these students’ experiences for you, a look into life inside Auburn, and a taste of the work that the volunteers of the Cornell Prison Education Program commit themselves to every week of the semester.

Esther and Adina Rubin-Budick (’13) established the eponymous Writer’s Bloc student organization on campus to promote incarcerated peoples’ self-expression and to educate the general population about incarceration.

Shane Kalb took over as President of the student organization in Fall 2013, and the current website and online archive was posted in December 2013.