Dignity Not Detention Anthology

This anthology is a story of collaboration: San Diego-based nonprofit Allies to End Detention worked with Poetry@Tech, Poetry International, and Calypso Editions to create the 2019 #DignityNot Detention Prize to honor refugee
and migrant voices at Otay Mesa Detention Center. The intention of the prize–and this anthology–is to give the detained poets an audience outside of detention center walls, and also connect them, in the pages of this book, with voices of poets-allies, who wrote to them from all around the world.
*
“Am I an immigrant or someone seeking justice / Am I an immigrant or a criminal. / I am confused please let me know judge:” so writes Daniel B., from Eritrea, currently detained in Otay Mesa Detention Center. Having escaped his native country under duress, he surrendered to United States authorities at the border in hope of receiving asylum. But this new life isn’t what he expected. “All I desire is to be granted a refuge,” he writes, “so I can light a candle to light my life.”

Daniel B. is one of many thousands of refugees who come to US borders with great hope, and who are met with men in uniforms who place them in dehumanizing situations and captivity.

“My nation has no color, my nation has no border
my nation has people with a deportation order […]
My nation has fear […]
Even tho deportation is near
I hope that God can hear
How everynite my people cry”

So writes another refugee, Marlon R. S., from El Salvador. He came to the US border with great hope and instead found himself in Otay Mesa, a detention center operated by a private prison corporation, where over 900 other refugees and immigrants are held.
*
The winners, runners-up, and finalists of poet-allies outside detention include a broad range: some are widely published, and have received such prestigious honors as the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Pushcart Prize, a Poet Laureateship, and Best American Poetry anthology publications, while others have never been published before. While there was no contest entrance fee for the migrants and refugees, poets from the outside did pay a fee to enter the competition. All of the contest entrance fees were sent as donations to detainee accounts inside Otay Mesa to help with such basics as food, drink, or shoes.
*
Calypso Editions is honored to present the poems of these brave refugees and detainees alongside poets from outside detention in this new anthology, with a special afterword by Ilya Kaminsky, who judged the 2019 #DignityNotDetention prize. All poems have been translated from and into some of the languages spoken at Otay Mesa Detention Center. All proceeds from the sale of the limited print run will be donated via Allies to End Detention to detainee accounts at Otay Mesa Detention Center. Once the print run is sold through, the anthology will be made available as a free digital book through the Calypso website.

Praise

“Cataloguing poetry’s social virtues, people almost always mention the way lyric can “give voice to the voiceless.” I’ve always bristled at this—Dignity Not Detention should thoroughly disabuse all readers of the notion that any human being is, or has ever been, “voiceless.” Yes, some have had their voices violently suppressed, had myriad social and political forces move to silence their voices. But still, they had voices. Every member of our species has lived a fully unprecedented experience affording them a singular, never-to-be-repeated perspective. That is what a carceral state seeks to suppress: voices that complicate the narratives it tells of its own magnanimity. This anthology lives up to the promise of its name—the poems here dignify and illuminate the stories empire would hide away. Farris and Minniti-Shippey have assembled for us a mighty choir of voices. Listen—”
–Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“It’s an incredibly moving and humbling experience to hold in one’s hands these poems from refugees detained on US borders, to read them and read them again. I was so touched by the honesty and clarity of these voices…one wants to encourage as many poets as possible—especially those who find themselves in such a difficult situation, especially when all of it is created unjustly, by our unjust government, in our name.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic