Apogee Journal presents a new vertical by the name of Freedom Meridian, which focuses exclusively on publishing, uplifting, and funding creative works by formerly and currently incarcerated folks. To commemorate the launch, the four section editors have penned the following open letter to the Apogee community and beyond.
We are a collective of abolitionists, writers, and artists attempting to create a place we have yearned for: one where we can collaborate across prison walls with intention. Collectively, our objective is to cultivate the imagination, artistic practice, and collaborative spirit of incarcerated artists and writers by building a space where their creative contributions are centered, celebrated, and equitably compensated.
The term “Apogee” denotes the point furthest from the center, reiterating how this journal works to center the margins and create a landing place for all those whose narratives are routinely excluded, minimized, and erased. This latest project from Apogee Journal builds off the momentum of our 2021 Inside/Out issue and continues this critical work in the site of the prison, tending to those furthest from the center of the current literary publishing community.
Unlike the equator, which signifies the latitudinal center of the Earth, there is no natural point of division between east and west hemispheres. The prime meridian is the universally acknowledged longitudinal starting line—0 degrees— from where we can begin to measure how far east or west we are going. There is no place to start or end until we choose it.
In traditional Chinese Medicine, the body is understood as a collective of meridians, each of which carries qi (vital energy) through the body, uniting what may seem like disparate parts into an energetic whole. Along each meridian, there are acupoints, where energy pools or collects, and where we can intervene to disperse it once again, returning the body to its proper balance.
We offer freedom meridians as the imaginary lines that carve out the innumerable paths to freedom we are capable of perceiving, experiencing, and designing. This project aims to collect all of these meridians by archiving the stories of the people living under various states of unfreedom. Each line is a part of the wider narrative, holding a unique energy, and bridging together disparate selves across space and time.
We understand that the social, economic, and psychological violence of the carceral state creates conditions of unsafety, systemic surveillance, and cycles of trauma with deep roots. Our literary communities must evolve to meet the needs of artists living within these realities. This cannot be done through mere inclusion, but by radically rethinking why we write, draw, paint, and make art in the first place.
Through publishing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art, Freedom Meridian seeks to illuminate the collective struggle, artistry, and survival of people surviving the criminal legal system. We believe this work should be led by those most directly impacted. Thus, it is imperative we design more accessible models of collaborative creativity in pursuit of that liberated horizon. In that vein, two of our four editors are currently incarcerated and compensated at a rate equal to our outside editors. We’ve prioritized co-creating this vertical as a group of four, experimenting with a novel masthead structure that seeks to honor the full range of creative contributions and editorial insight unique to our inside editors.
Beyond publishing, this project is an invitation to the rest of the literary ecosystem and broader creative community to journey alongside us in this quest to delegitimize the prison walls and their attempts to divide, isolate, and conquer. Our goal is to support other formations that would like to bring inside artists into editorial and creative administrative roles. We hope to further develop this emerging liberatory creative ecosystem, alongside our existing partner Empowerment Avenue, which explicitly seeks out and embraces incarcerated collaborators.
We, the editors of Freedom Meridian, set out to record a time in history and capture the voices of those surviving within the vast carceral system that stretches beyond jails and prisons. More than just an outlet for the underrepresented, and beyond outreach, we aim to co-design a space of collaborative creativity across prison walls—our attempt at the ambitious endeavor of mapping the whole sky.
Invitation: You can read our first piece soon, and subscribe to get updates on future work we publish. We invite you to view our submissions page where you can find information about our general reading period as well as two themed calls for work that will be published in special folios edited by our inside editors, Meech and Paris. Reach out to our team at freedommeridian@apogeejournal.org
In solidarity,
The Editors of Freedom Meridian
Demetrius “Meech” Buckley
Jasmine Butler
Mery Concepción Pacheco
Paris Whitfield