Thank you to all who donated for GiveNOLA Day! We received about $3000 which is a lot for us. Postage prices have gone up, so the money will help a lot. We may also purchase more books on job skills to send inside.

We’re still sending out books as fast as we can. We are not accepting any volunteers. Our book drop is closed, but you can use our wishlist or mail us books that fit our donation guidelines.

We hope the pandemic ends so we can go back to normal, but as long as we are in a pandemic, we will not be operating the way we used to. We miss you all and hope to see you as soon as it’s safe to meet.

It turns out the link was broken for this form. Here’s a working link! You can print this out and give it to your loved one inside, and they can fill it out, fold it up, and mail it to us. It’s optional– they don’t have to use this, but it’s just an easy way to share our information with people inside. They can also just write us a letter.

We’re really sorry if you or someone inside has been waiting a long time for books. We were closed for most of 2020 and we fell very, very behind on answering book requests. We reopened a couple of months ago in a very limited capacity. We’re still not hosting volunteers because our space is too small for social distancing and we want to keep everyone safe. The organizer collective is working hard behind the scenes to get as many books out as we can, but it’s slow going without all our hard-working volunteers helping out. We’re currently caught up to around June/July (or November-ish for Angola). We are trying our best, and we haven’t forgotten about you. Please bear with us.

Our sweet stats are all messed up now. We have shipped out approximately 1700-2000 packages per year for the past five years, and have generally managed to increase our output every year. In 2020, we shipped out 533 packages.

If you or a loved one is locked up in Mississippi, please be aware that we have passed the torch on to Big House Books, PO Box 55586, Jackson, MS 39296. If you sent us a letter last year from a Mississippi facility, we either returned it to you with a note, or we forwarded it on for Big House Books to fill the request for you. Going forward, all Mississippi letters will be returned with a note. This will allow us to focus on our other three states (LA, AL, and AR) and Big House Books to focus on your state, so it should work out better for all of us.

If you or a loved one is in Caldwell Correctional, then you should be seeing a lot more books in the prison library soon– we sent a bunch of boxes of really good books up there. If you or a loved one is in Forrest City, we know all about the Great Book Purge of 2018 and we really want to send books to the library, but we can’t seem to get in touch with anyone within the prison administration. Please let us know if you have any advice on how to reach them and get the library restocked.

We have a big announcement: We are no longer serving Mississippi at this time. Due to the obstacles we’re facing due to Covid, we have decided to shrink our service area to facilities in Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas. We have a major backlog of book requests that we are working hard to catch up on, and this will allow us to focus our work more efficiently.

Mississippi prisons and juvenile detention centers will now be served by Big House Books, PO Box 55586, Jackson, MS 39296. We are proud to support them as they continue to grow and do great work in Mississippi.

Don’t worry, we’re still sending out books! But our space is closed indefinitely, which means we can’t host volunteers or accept used book donations at this time. It also means we don’t know when we will reopen our space to the public. We take the health and safety of our collective and our volunteers very seriously, so we will be closed until we feel it’s safe. Thank you all for your support! We will update when the situation changes and we are able to resume normal operations.