Bates, Laura. Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2013.

Surely not a new title, but one I have been interested in reading. I am grateful to the committee who chose this title as part of a local reading competition, providing me with the perfect reason to purchase and read this memoir. I love a good memoir. I am fascinated by the genre. I love reading and teaching Shakespeare. My passion for exposing students to quality literature, just to expose them to quality literature aside, this title offers a variety of ways that Shakespeare speaks to men and women of today.

I find myself fascinated by Dr. Bates’ work. I sometimes fancy myself as awfully brave, offering up Shakespeare to reluctant high schoolers. But her work in a maximum security prison in her home state of Indiana puts me to shame. Further, the results she gets both in writing and orally, stunning. Certainly I will share the videos and transcripts of some of this work that is available with my students who are seldom convinced of the bard’s accessibility. I am actively trying to locate the workbooks that she wrote in conjunction with Larry Newton, one of her first and most successful Shakespeare students.

Dr. Bates does a lovely job of intertwining her own life, learnings, and inspirations with that of the prisoners with whom she works, creating a bridge that many readers might refuse to believe exists between those in and outside of prison. Larry Newton’s insistence on the idea that we all are imprisoned, some just more physically irrevocably than others is certainly one for my students to consider. I see them create and maintain boundaries all of the time. What a challenging way for them (&me!) to look at life. The idea that we are not all that difference from the maximum security prisoner is also one worth consideration. At some level this notion is explored in The Other Wes Moore also in my library.

Certainly, I will be using this in my AP Literature course, and have already mentioned it to our other teachers who teach Shakespeare. I am also seeing potential for some book talking. Because of the core, we have intentionally increased the focus of these talks on nonfiction. I can certainly pair this with the Wes Moore titles. I also have many modern renditions of Shakespeare’s work that would work nicely for a whole Shakespeare theme. I am eager to get started in all of these directions.

I enjoyed this Ted talk as I was working through the memoir - Shakespeare in Shackles: The Transformative Power of Literature: Laura Bates at TEDxUCLA. And...and an NPR interview to look at.