Teach in Prison

Project Leader: West Hays

West Hays will graduate from UC Berkeley in December of 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He spent his teens and early-twenties employed in the IT field, and has worked with San Quentin’s Education department since 2007. West was once offered the rare opportunity to view the prison from its tallest watchtower, which he could not accept because of a deep-seated fear of heights. His favorite writers include Nathanael West, Virginia Woolf, and the San Quentin inmate-students who have found their voices inside the H-Unit poetry class.

Other Team Member(s) Info:

Alayna Johnson majors in art practice and minors in education, and will graduate with a Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in May of 2010. She has a strong background in teaching and tutoring, and runs an annual film project where she converts stories written by 5th graders into short films. Alayna currently works in Arts in Corrections, Adult Basic Education, and SQTV.

Vanessa McMahan has a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology from UC Santa Cruz and is a Study Coordinator for an HIV prevention clinical trial at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology in San Francisco. Ms. McMahan will be responsible for the regulatory component of this study and will assist in study design and data collection and analysis.