A Visit with Susan Burton

Author & founder of A New Way of Life reentry program

Author and activist Susan Burton will be discussing her life and work as founder of the New Way of Life reentry program for formerly incarcerated women in Los Angeles.

Susan Burton, author of Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women, will be speaking at the Fayetteville Public Library Event Center about her life and mission to help formerly incarcerated women find recovery services and opportunities. Burton struggled to rise above a life of poverty, violence, and loss, and was enmeshed in the cycle of mass incarceration for nearly two decades. After being released from prison for the sixth time, she was finally able to access recovery services in an affluent area of Los Angeles. There, she discovered and embraced opportunities that were never offered before. She became determined to bring those resources to areas plagued by poverty and over-incarceration.

Please note that this event will be providing both ASL interpretation and CART captioning services, which can be accessed here. Stream text can also be accessed at this link. 

Susan Burton holds an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from California State University, Northridge and is a Soros Justice Fellow. Burton was selected as a CNN Top 10 Hero in 2010 and was named as one of 18 New Civil Rights Leaders in the nation by the Los Angeles Times in 2015.  She has also received the Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award, Encore Purpose Prize, James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award, Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice and the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for her memoir.

A poster created by the University of Arkansas for the event can be found here.  

About A New Way of Life program

A nationally acclaimed reentry program for women, A New Way of Life was established in 1998 by Susan Burton. Her personal journey inspired her to bring the resources that helped her to areas plagued by poverty and over-incarceration.

Her vision attracted like-minded community members and the project grew. From its humble beginnings as a single reentry home in South Los Angeles, A New Way of Life has grown into a holistic reentry program. A New Way of Life now have teams dedicated to housing, legal services, workforce and education development, and advocacy. Since establishment, A New of Life has provided housing to over 1,500 formerly incarcerated women, helped reunite more than 400 women with their children, and provided pro bono legal services to more than 3,400 community members with conviction histories.

This project is supported in part by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  This event is also being co-sponsored by the Fayetteville Public Library, the Prison Story Project, and the following divisions of the University of Arkansas: the Brown Chair in English Literacy Initiative and the Community Literacies Collaboratory, the Department of English, the Gender Studies Program, the Program in Creative Writing and Translation, the School of Social Work, the University of Arkansas Humanities Center, and the World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department.

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