‘The Undiscovered Country’ Guest Quentin Lewis Featured on the New York Times
Poet Quentin Lewis featured on WRFI's limited series The Undiscovered Country in March 2025 is the focus of a recent New York Times article.
Quentin Lewis is fighting his conviction while locked up at Wende Correctional in Western New York. Hear his poems. And listen as he joins Michael in conversation about writing in prison, Quentin’s work as a jailhouse lawyer, and the burden of being imprisoned while maintaining one’s innocence.
Quentin Lewis was featured on the March 2025 episode of The Undiscovered Country. Copies of a hand-bound chapbook featuring Quentin's poems can be purchased in our webstore. 50% of proceeds of the sale of the book will be sent to Quentin. The book's cover and title page were hand-printed on an antique letter-press in collaboration with Caleb Harrington at the Ithaca Generator. The bindings were sewn by the staff at Sew Green.
Hamlet calls death "the undiscovered country," a mysterious land from which no one returns. Host Michael Rhynes repurposes the concept to highlight the invisibility and disenfranchisement of prison populations. Although incarcerated people are all around us, they are largely invisible to us, their humanity erased.
In the program, Michael engages poets and writers who are incarcerated in New York. We'll hear about their work and lives. The project aims to elevate these writers' voices and restore what's lost to all of us when people are exiled to "The Undiscovered Country."
"The Undiscovered Country" is a partnership between WRFI, Prisoner Express, the Cornell Prison Education Program and Civic Ensemble's Re-Entry Theatre project and supported by a grant from Humanities New York.
