Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?

I met Janie at the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, New
York, in the summer of 1992. She had grown up in Concord, Massachusetts,
was a New York artist, and had recently worked as an artist in communities
in South Africa. So much of what has happened in the Prison Creative Arts
Project and in my life is a result of our meeting. During my 1993 sabbatical, I moved to New York City to be near her, and at the end of 1994 she moved to Ann Arbor to live with me. She took a position in the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and soon started up an art workshop at the Western Wayne Correctional Facility. In November 1995 we wrote to prisons within a two-hundred-mile radius of Ann Arbor, inviting artists to submit work to an exhibition of art by Michigan prisoners. That exhibition is now in its fifteenth year, and Janie has sent as many as two hundred students to facilitate art workshops in Michigan prisons and juvenile facilities, and many of her students have joined the Prison Creative Arts Project. Behind everything in this book is her spirit, which is both gentle and fierce, her generosity, tolerance, and uncompromising insistence on what is just, and her grounding in nature and in something deep in herself. On September 9, 2007, celebrating our roots in small towns bordering Lake Michigan, we married on a bluff with the lake at our backs. I am not telling her story in this book, but I need you to know at the outset, that she is deeply a part of the story I am telling.
[Ann Arbor: 2010]

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