Prairie Lights

Associate Professor of Music Education Mary L. Cohen will read from her book, Music-Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices. This important new work looks at the role music-making can play in achieving goals of accountability and healing that challenge the widespread assumption that prisons and punishment keep societies safe. Cohen and her co-author, Stuart P. Duncan argue that music-making create sopportunities to humanize the complexity of crime, sustain meaningful relationships between incarcerated individuals and their families, and builds social awareness of the prison industrial complex. The authors combine scholarship and personal experience to guide music educators, music aficionados, and social activists to create restorative social practicesthrough music-making.

Mary L. Cohen is a music education professor at the University of Iowa who researches choral singing, songwriting, and ungrading practices. Her studies are published in book chapters and in the International Journal of Research in Choral Singing, Australian Journal of Music Education, Journal of Correctional Education, International Journal of Community Music, Prison Service Journal, and International Journal of Music Education. She led the Oakdale Prison Community Choir and Songwriting Workshop for 12 years before the COVID19 pandemic began.