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2020 Soledad raid on Black prisoners hits the courtroom
2020 Soledad raid on Black prisoners hits the courtroom
March 3, 2021
by Tasha Williams
In the summer of 2020, when COVID-19 was rapidly surging throughout the nation, prison officials at Soledad State Prison off the central coast of California pulled a highly illegal and brutal show of force, now known as “Operation Akili,” that ended with serious injuries to incarcerated men and soon after led to a massive spike in coronavirus cases within the facility.
The men were rounded up and zip-tied behind their backs after being thrown from their beds in the middle of their sleep. They were taken to the chow hall where they were forced to sit, four men to a small table, for six hours straight.
Celebrate the 129
th birthday of Pulitzer Prize poet Edna St. Vincent Millay with Maine poets reading letters and poems that focus on Millay’s exploration of loss and renewal. Poets will also read their own poems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, personal loss, and the threat of global climate change.
A hundred years ago, Millay began writing “Renascence” in 1911 when she was nineteen and caring for her ailing father in Kingman, Maine. “Renascence,” which moves between life and death and ends with a sense of hope and revival, was the first poem to catapult Millay to stardom, winning fourth place in The Lyric Year anthology in 1912. This year’s annual birthday reading will focus on Millay’s poems that mediate a balance between grief and renewal of hope, such as those from her third collection, Second Spring, that includes an elegy for Millay’s Vassar classmate who died from the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.