Information In and Out of Prisons: A Panel

Join Brooklyn Public Library’s Jail and Prison Services team as they discuss programming, storytelling, and access to information and media inside and outside of prisons. Moderated by Piper Anderson.

Piper Anderson is a writer, coach, and cultural organizer whose work blends embodiment practice, storytelling, and socially engaged artmaking to activate the collective imagination toward social change. Through her creative studio, Create Forward, she partners with mission-driven organizations to design healing-centered, justice-rooted culture and narrative strategies. Piper is the co-founder of the Rikers Public Memory Project, a community archive that holds the largest collection of personal narratives documenting the legacy of Rikers Island to mobilize action to repair its generational harms. Piper is a TED Resident, Aspen Ideas Fellow, and Laundromat Project’s first Radical Imagination Fellow.

Jail and Prison Services Panel:

Claire Mooney is a writer and librarian from Virginia. She is BPL’s supervising librarian for Jail & Prison Services. Her work is concerned with bringing care ethics and hospitality to hostile environments.

Evelyn Perez is an artist from the Bronx and was formerly an outreach assistant on the Jail & Prison Services team.

Juan Zazueta has been with the Jail & Prison Services Team since October 2024. Prior to joining BPL as an Outreach Assistant, he interned with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and supported the work of the Prisoner Advisory Committee. He has over 8 years of experience organizing against carceral apparatuses & is a committed student of abolition. At the University of Virginia, he wrote a thesis, “House of Abolition: Ballroom as Resistance to Policing,” exploring the life of Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco who was a 27-year-old Afro-Latina trans woman who died at Rikers Island while in solitary confinement and suffered an epileptic seizure, while correctional officers laughed as she lay unresponsive. He works towards creating life-affirming futures for marginalized communities and building a world where everyone is free and committed to the well- being of each other.

Mia Vasquez is an artist and archivist from New York, and the Outreach Associate for Jail and Prison services at the Brooklyn Public Library. Since 2023, they have brought library services to Rikers Island Jail Complex. In this work, they approach librarianship as a liberatory practice rooted in abolition, mutual-aid and harm reduction through books and information access.

Serita Sargent is a PhD/MLIS student hailing from the Deep South. Their work centers uplifting community voices, harm reduction and community archival work. They are forever a student of abolition and believe in expanding information access for those who are incarcerated. When they’re not dreaming of dismantling the system or organizing you can probably find them in the woods!