I think it was both and I think it was the synergy between the two which I thought was, for me at least, a creative one.Īnd, by the way, I would add also yeshiva. I did feel like something was missing in my education. I felt like I needed to do that in some way, too, but I didn't really want to go to a regular school and I wasn't really interested in the usual track. It was a time when many of my friends were considering grad school, and were going to further their education in a variety of ways. I came into the prison in many ways cognizant of the fact that this was another step in my education.

I think that it would have been a shame to do one without the other. Where did you get more of an education – Harvard or “the Bay”? Steinberg spoke with the Monitor via phone to discuss his path from yeshiva to prison. And then there's the former library patron who holds up Steinberg at knife point in a park, before recognizing him as “the book guy.”

There's the pimp who's writing his memoirs and the inmate who memorizes Shakespeare to get through solitary confinement. His new memoir, Running the Books, explores the role of the library in a prison and offers vividly drawn portraits of those who work and read there. Steinberg sent in his résumé, and then spent the next 2-1/2 years at “the Bay,” as both a librarian and a teacher of creative writing classes to inmates. The posting was for a prison librarian at the Suffolk County House of Correction in Massachusetts. Avi Steinberg, a former yeshiva student and Harvard graduate, was working as a freelance obituary writer when he saw an ad for a full-time job with health benefits.

Running the books by avi steinberg