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

“Redbone Dances” by Mahogany L. Browne

If you ain’t never watched your parents kiss ain’t neva have them teach you ‘bout the way lips will to bend & curve against a lover’s affirmation If you ain’t never watched the knowing nod of sweethearts worn away & soft as a speaker box’s blown out hiss If you ain’t witnessed the glue that connected your mother & father —how they fused their single selves into the blunt fist of parents If you ain’t sure there was a time when their eyes held each other like a nexus breaking the lock to dip dark marbles into certain corners of a shot glass If you ain’t never known a Saturday night slick with shiny promises & clouds wrapped wet in a Pendergrass croon If you ain’t been taught how a man hold you close so close …it look like a crawl If you ain’t had the memory of your mother & father sliding hip to hip Their feet whisper a slow shuffle & shift Her hand on his neck grip the shoulder of a man that will pass his daughters bad tempers & hands like bowls If you ain’t watched a man lean into a woman His eyes a boat sliding across bronze His hands pillared in her auburn hair Her throat holds the urge to hear how her voice sounds against the wind of him If your skin can’t fathom the heat of something as necessary as this… Then you can’t know the hurricane of two bodies how the bodies can create the prospect of a sunrise how that sunrise got a name it sound like: a blues song; a woman’s heart breaking; From the record player skipping the sky almost blue