Inside Knowledge: Incarcerated People on the Failures of the American Prison, by Doran Larson, the Edward North Chair of Greek and Greek Literature and professor of Literature and Creative Writing Emeritus, was recently named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2025 by Choice, a publishing unit of the American Library Association. Choice provides high-quality evaluations of nonfiction academic writing.
Inside Knowledge, published in 2024 by NYU Press, examines the American prison system through the eyes of those who are trapped within it. It is based on some of the thousands of articles, written by incarcerated individuals, prison workers, and volunteers, that make up the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA).
Larson founded the AWPA at Hamilton in 2014 as a way to compile and preserve submissions he received for a book project. Long after the book, Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, was published, the submissions continued to come in. The ever-growing collection is currently housed at Johns Hopkins University.
According to the announcement of this year’s awards, the 339 print products and four digital resources honored this year were chosen from the “more than 2,800 titles reviewed by Choice during the past year.”
The works were chosen based on “their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as an important—often the first—treatment of their subject,” according to the announcement. In all, more than 13,000 submissions were received by Choice during the year, making the three percent named Outstanding Academic Titles “the best of the best,” the announcement said.
Posted December 12, 2025
