Additional information
by Leigh Sugar (Author)
Traversing an impossible love story, Leigh Sugar's debut collection, Freeland examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer.
Drawing critical connections between her personal and familial history, the Jewish diaspora, the racial imaginary of whiteness, and the philosophical and literal evolution of the prison machine, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Refreshing and honest narrative poems follow the gradual dissolution of a once intense love that begins to blur amidst the constant crush of the speaker's loneliness. How do you choose between loving someone who exists in your life only in shadow, and walking away, knowing they don't have the same choice?
Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.
Author Biography
LEIGH SUGAR is a writer, editor, and educator. Her debut poetry collection Freeland is forthcoming from Alice James Books in June 2025. Sugar is an associate producer for Rachel Zucker's poetry podcast Commonplace and the creator/editor of That's a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Settings (New Village Press, 2023). She has taught many courses and workshops at sites such as the Institute for Justice and Opportunity and Justice Arts Coalition, and her work is widely published in print and online. Sugar holds an MFA in poetry from NYU, a Master of Public Administration specializing in Criminal Justice Policy from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and is a University of Michigan Hopwood Writing Awardee. She lives in Michigan with her pup.
