About

Learn more about David Coogan

From the south-side of Chicago to the Richmond City Jail, David Coogan, Ph.D, has made a career out of crossing the boundaries of race and class with his teaching. His essays about doing community-writing projects in public housing and in struggling public schools have appeared in the journals College English, College Composition and Communication, Community Literacy, and (forthcoming) in the books Active Voices (SUNY Press) and The Public Work of Rhetoric (University of South Carolina Press). He lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and two children.

David Coogan began working with ex offenders in the fall of 2005, when several of his students in a service learning course (English 200, Research Writing), volunteered at Offender Aid and Restoration, a nonprofit with offices in downtown Richmond and the City Jail.  In 2006, he launched a prison writing course for VCU students, where students not only read the published literature of prisoners and ex offenders but take turns typing the hand-written drafts of the men in the city jail workshop, offering feedback and meeting those who have been released during class.

Coogan’s Prison Writing Project is well-established as an outreach effort, an engaged learning experience for VCU students, and a book project. In 2008, the Prison Writing Project was highlighted as one of VCU’s 40 Acts of Caring (celebrating the university’s 40th anniversery) and spotlighted in VCU’s winning application to the President’s Commission on Higher Education Community Engagement Honor Roll.  More recently Coogan was featured on the radio show, With Good Reason, and has appeared as a guest columnist in the Richmond Times Dispatch. He is currently teaching a second workshop in autobiography at the jail, but with two significant changes: this one is for women offenders, and VCU women (undergraduates and graduate students) are working side by side with them on their writing at the jail.