Akeem Browder is a social justice advocate and agent of change. The Bronx native works to honor the legacy of his brother Kalief Browder, and mother Venida Browder by working with elected officials, lawyers, doctors, college students and community based organizations to change laws, policies and regulations that devastate poor communities and families that have been impacted by mass incarceration and solitary confinement in State prisons. He is the founder of Shut Down Rikers, and the Kalief Browder Foundation. A civil engineer by trade, he is currently traveling the country promoting the six-part Spike TV docu-series Time: The Kalief Browder Story.

Jacob Cohen is a Brooklyn-based experimental cellist, visual artist, and educator. Since 2014, he has been working with adolescents and young adults incarcerated on Rikers Island. He brings his cello directly to the housing units, often playing for those that have received infractions for violent behavior while there. After about a year he started to draw portraits of them and their surroundings. At first they were very basic, but over time complexity and nuance began to develop and the drawings began to capture something deeply personal about the subjects, and revealing of the system in which they are ensnared. These images are of youth, ages 16-21, currently incarcerated and awaiting sentencing. Dispatches from the Ghost Ship was an installation of portraits and landscapes of life on Rikers Island, created by artist Jacob Cohen. The exhibition consists of over 500 observational drawings made over the course of four years of Cohen’s work, teaching and performing on Riker’s, as well as a selection of drawings made in collaboration with young inmates. There are no photos taken of the inmates during their incarceration other than their mug shot. No cameras are allowed onto the island. This exhibition at the Queens Museum is the first public showing of these images.

Free Verse, a weekly poetry workshop and open mic at NYC’s NeONs in probation centers, turns waiting time into writing time by giving poets from all walks of life a safe space to write about their personal experiences. Poets share experiences with the criminal justice system and family shelters; and experiences with racial profiling and other social issues. Free Verse provides a platform for writers to spread their messages in a world that may often treat them as invisible or dismisses their observations as figments of the imagination. This reading and open mic will ask Free Verse poets and the public to share words about experiences that may not be easily seen or talked about in our communities, and to write on-site responses to the current Queens Museum exhibition, “Dispatches from the Ghost Ship.”