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Bell Chevigny

Bell Chevigny celebrating Grace Paley (2008)

Bell Gale Chevigny (1936 - 2021) was Professor Emerita of Literature at Purchase College and an anti-prison activist: “It was Bell who laid a foundation for how we build an alternative culture and set of systems to abolish prisons.” She was on the board of the Human Rights Defense Center.

Bell Chevigny was married to Paul Chevigny, a law professor at New York University. Their daughters are Katy Chevigny and Blue Chevigny.

Contents

1 Obituary
2 Occupy Movement Support
3 Human Rights Defense Center
4 Not In Our Name
5 References
Obituary

From PEN America:[1]

Introduction

Professor and activist Bell Gale Chevigny (1936-2021) remained a central figure and mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program since its founding in the early 1970s. Throughout her life, Bell taught in prisons, advocated for educational opportunities for incarcerated communities, and promoted the work of writers in prison throughout the country. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (Arcade Publishing), her edited volume published in 1999 and reprinted in 2011, represents just a fraction of what she inspired in her students and her tireless volunteer work as part of PEN America’s Prison Writing Committee.
During December 2022’s Break Out, an annual celebration honoring winners of the PEN Prison Writing Awards, the Prison and Justice Writing staff paid tribute to Chevigny with a video celebrating her life and her service to incarcerated writers. The inspiring memorial essay below was written by co-committee member Susan Rosenburg and read in Chevigny’s honor as well. The essay has been reprinted from Variations on an Undisclosed Location, the 2022 Prison Writing Awards anthology.

Obituary (excerpt)

“...Bell Gale Chevigny taught literature inside prisons, and she built networks with others who were doing extraordinary things in relationship to prisoners and their individual lives long before the concept of mass incarceration became a topic of national discourse. Bell connected with people like Buzz Alexander, who founded the Prison Creative Arts Program (PCAP) at the University of Michigan, Hettie Jones, who headed PEN’s Prison and Justice Writing program and taught writing for years at Bedford Hills women’s prison, as well as Gara LaMarche, who as a human rights advocate promoted and supported both the Prison Writing and Freedom to Write campaigns.

Bell never forgot that statistics can serve as a cover-up to the humanity of each and every person imprisoned by this country. She never accepted the criminalization and dehumanization of people inside. Bell always tried to balance the ideas of the individual writer who found their creativity and artistic self while in prison and the need for social movements that actually can have power and bring about change. The tension between artist and advocate was one that Bell embodied.

In 2009, Bell and I (Susan Rosenberg), along with other artists, activists, and scholars, participated in the Blue Mountain Center’s first focus residency on prisons. At that time Bell was working on editing Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) V19 #1. The issue of the JPP featured nonfiction pieces that addressed issues of punishment and creative resistance and were written by winners of the PEN America Prison Writing Contest. Bell always looked for publication platforms to amplify incarcerated people’s work...
[...]

Writer, painter, professor, organizer, advocate, anti-racist, anti-war activist, freedom rider, beat, Bell was inspired by and contributed to justice in America and around the world. She gave the entirety of her life to this robust, challenging and, often, thankless work. Bell died this past year after a hard and long illness. What she left behind is a beautiful legacy filled with critical thinking and grace. Bell Gale Chevigny sits with the great luminaries of PEN America’s past. Those like Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Grace Paley, and so many others, who consistently elevated the writings of the dispossessed. Bell is one of the elders whose shoulders people such as Nicole Fleetwood and Dwayne Betts and Caits Meissner stand. It was Bell who laid a foundation for how we build an alternative culture and set of systems to abolish prisons.

Purchase College Obituary

Verbatim from Purchase College:[2]

Bell Chevigny was one of the founders of the literature program. Throughout her years at Purchase, her extraordinary energy, intellect, joie de vivre, and sense of engagement animated the Literature Board of Study, the School of Humanities, and the Gender Studies program and radiated throughout the entire college. Bell kept up with changes at Purchase while remaining constant in her vision of a public college of the liberal arts and arts that welcomed and continues to welcome all promising students. She was a brilliant teacher and a pathbreaking scholar of American literature, which, in a move way ahead of its time, she reconceived as the literature of the Americas. In that and along with her colleagues across the humanities, she was responsible for the global reach of the literature major and for its welcoming of feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and other interdisciplinary approaches to the study of texts in many languages from all times and places.

Bell had a lifelong commitment to a humane and progressive politics and invested much time and energy in causes she believed in while at Purchase and throughout her retirement. A student, scholar and teacher with a passion for literature, she became, in mid-life, a published novelist.
When Bell retired, the School of Humanities honored her by establishing the Bell Chevigny Prize for Feminist Studies in the Humanities which recognizes the work of students who follow in her footsteps. We mourn her loss and celebrate her many legacies.

Bell Gale Chevigny was the author of “The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings” and the novel “Chloe and Olivia”; the editor of “Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing” (A PEN American Center Prize Anthology) and Twentieth century interpretations of Endgame: a collection of critical essays (Prentice-Hall); and co-editor (with Gari Laguardia) of Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America (Cambridge University Press).

Occupy Movement Support

Bell Chevigny was on the list of “Occupy Writers” who put her name to a statement in solidarity with the Occupy Movement: “We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.”[3]

Human Rights Defense Center

Bell Chevigny was on the board of the Human Rights Defense Center:[4]

“Bell Chevigny is professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, SUNY. She has served on the PEN Prison Writing Program for more than twenty years, three of them as chair. The Prison Writing Program offers an annual literary competition to incarcerated men and women nationwide. With the support of a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship, she compiled Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing, a PEN American Center anthology. She has written extensively about incarcerated writers, their struggles for dignity and justice, and their literary accomplishments.

Not In Our Name

In 2003, Paul Chevigny and Bell Chevigny signed the Not In Our Name “Statement of Conscience”.[5] The statement was affiliated with Courage to Resist, Iraq Veterans Against the War, CODEPINK, World Can’t Wait -Drive Out the Bush Regime, Longest Walk 2, United for Peace and Justice and the Revolutionary Communist Party.

References
Bell Chevigny obituary (accessed June 12, 2023)
Bell Gale Chevigny, 1936-2021 (accessed June 12, 2023)
We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world (accessed June 12, 2023)
Board (accessed June 12, 2023)
Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience (accessed June 11, 2023)