In Conversation: On This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life

Earlonne Woods is the co-creator, co-host, and co-producer of Ear Hustle (PRX & Radiotopia). In 1997, he was sentenced to 31 years to life in prison, and while incarcerated, received his GED, attended Coastline Community College, and completed many vocational programs. He also founded CHOOSE1, which aims to repeal the California Three Strikes Law, the statute under which he was sentenced. In November 2018, then California Gov. Jerry Brown commuted his sentence after 21 years of incarceration and Woods became a full-time producer for Ear Hustle, a collaboration with Nigel Poor. They met at California’s San Quentin State Prison, where they discovered a shared interest in storytelling, and while neither had podcast production experience, they decided to enter Radiotopia’s contest for new shows – and won. Using the prize for seed money, they launched Ear Hustle, named after the prison term for “eavesdropping.” In This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life (Crown), Woods and Poor discuss their stories, creating their phenomenally popular podcast amid extreme limitations, and present new stories, all with the same insight, balance, and rapport that distinguish their podcast.

Writer, curator, and art critic Nicole R. Fleetwood, Ph.D., is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press). Her many interests include contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, creative nonfiction, prison abolition, and carceral and poverty studies.

A visual artist and photography professor who has had her work exhibited nationally and internationally, Nigel Poor is the co-creator, co-host, and co-producer of Ear Hustle (PRX & Radiotopia). In 2011, she became involved with San Quentin State Prison as a volunteer teacher for the Prison University Project, where she met Earlonne Woods. The two discovered a shared interest in storytelling, and while neither had podcast production experience, they decided to enter Radiotopia’s contest for new shows – and won. Using the prize for seed money, they launched Ear Hustle, named after the prison term for eavesdropping. In This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life (Crown), Poor and Woods discuss their stories, creating their phenomenally popular podcast amid extreme limitations, and present new stories, all with the same insight, balance, and rapport that distinguish their podcast.