On October 28, the Women Writing Women's Lives Biography Seminar is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary with a very special program: “Inside Stories: Women's Voices from Prison.” Two women writers, formerly incarcerated, will read from their work and discuss the role that writing has played in their lives both in prison and upon release. Seminar members Bell Gale Chevigny and Jane Maher will co-facilitate the discussion. Collections of writings by women in prison will be on sale, and a reception will follow the presentations and discussion. This program is free and open to the public.

Bell Gale Chevigny is professor emerita of literature at Purchase College, SUNY. Her books include Chloe and Olivia, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings, and Doing Time, 25 Years of Prison Writing, a PEN American Center Prize Anthology. Since the early nineties, she has been a member of both Women Writing Women's Lives and the PEN Prison Writing Committee.

Jane Maher is a composition professor at Nassau Community College. A member of Women Writing Women's Lives for five years, she is the author of the biography of Mina P. Shaughnessy (NCTE) and three other biographies. She directs the Pre-College Program for Marymount Manhattan College at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility where she has taught literature and writing to the student inmates for ten years. Among her essays about the college program is “My Way Out of This Life Is An Education,” Women's Studies Quarterly (Spring/Summer 2004).

Women Writing Women's Lives was established as a seminar in 1990 under the aegis of the Institute for the Humanities at New York University. It was a spin-off from a larger group interested in biography and created to give greater emphasis to gender-based questions about women's lives. In the fifteen years since its founding, its members have produced award-winning biographies and have reshaped some of the ways in which women's lives have been investigated and presented. It has brought together approximately sixty writers with and without academic affiliations to explore issues that characterize women's lives, problems of research, and techniques of writing.

In 1995, the seminar moved to the City University of New York, under the joint aegis of the Center for the Humanities and the Center for the Study of Women and Society; the two Centers will be sponsoring this event.