The A Line Meant Project

A Line Meant is your portal to inspiration, innovation and liberated community building. Here, you’re invited to explore, fellowship, and create.

A group of poets

About The Project

A Line Meant is a poetry exchange, created by Wisconsin Poet Laureate Emerita Dasha Kelly Hamilton. For the two years of her term, new works were traded randomly between laureates, farmers, inmates, students, novices, curious and generous souls. 

The initiative produced an anthology series and a professional fellowship for formerly incarcerated leaders and system-impacted communities. We center the voices and skills of formerly incarcerated organizers to seed creative networks and community circles.

A Line Meant is an initiative of Still Waters Collective, a nonprofit organization that leverages the creative process to impact human and social wellness.

Project Guidelines

SWC has delivered programming and mentorship to writers incarcerated in Wisconsin prisons since 2006.  Started at Racine Correctional Institution, Prose & Cons writing and spoken word program grew to be one of the most active pro-social activities of the institution.  It was co-curated with SWC leaders and incarcerated proctors and writers. 

Beyond poems and publications, the central goal is to deliver a consistent and curated space for inside carceral institutions that allow creativity, culture and conversation.  Prose & Cons is an acknowledgement of the humanity pulsing inside institution walls.

We offer classroom templates and programming guides for educators and organizers within and outside of carceral facilities.

Free Writing & Conversation Prompts

Get Prompts

ALM Curriculum Guide – $175.00

Coming Soon!

Write-In Event Instructions – $10.00

Coming Soon!

About The Book

The A Line Meant anthology presents selected works from 60 poets, hailing from 21 cities across my home state. The project invited the creativity of neighbors and connected the humanity of strangers. Starting with single lines of existing poetry, participants not only crafted their own unique works, but also shared their poems and insights as a form of connective tissue with one another. Like a tree from many roots, A Line Meant threads together both the professional and hobbyist poet, growing new, powerful art from the margins between. The resulting collection includes poems from poets laureate, inmates, farmers, servers, retirees, professors, parents, veterans, sports fans, students, nurses and a host of lives in between. Together, in poetic conversation, the work glimmers with the unexpected gorgeousness of neighbors. Every one, a gift.

Published by Jaded Ibis Press

Order the A Line Meant Anthology

Cover book of A Line Meant

Submission Portal

A Poet A Poet

The ALM poetry portal is one-time exchange. For each poem uploaded, you will receive an email with a poem written by someone else in the ALM network. Incarcerated writers may receive their poem matches via postal mail or an external advocate. Contact information is not shared between participants. Writers are encouraged to add their works to multiple prompts.

We are preparing Volume Two of our Anthology Series! All poems added to the ALM network will be considered for publication. Selection will begin in Fall of 2026.

Submit a Poem

Daily Poem

“a girl named jack” by JACQUELINE WOODSON

Good enough name for me, my father said the day I was born. Don’t see why she can’t have it, too. But the women said no. My mother first. Then each aunt, pulling my pink blanket back patting the crop of thick curls tugging at my new toes touching my cheeks. We won’t have a girl named Jack, my mother said. And my father’s sisters whispered, A boy named Jack was bad enough. But only so my mother could hear. Name a girl Jack, my father said, and she can’t help but grow up strong. Raise her right, my father said, and she’ll make that name her own. Name a girl Jack and people will look at her twice, my father said. For no good reason but to ask if her parents were crazy, my mother said. And back and forth it went until I was Jackie and my father left the hospital mad. My mother said to my aunts, Hand me that pen, wrote Jacqueline where it asked for a name. Jacqueline, just in case someone thought to drop the ie. Jacqueline, just in case I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer and further away from Jack.