Welcome to
Rosebuds Reading Collective

Rosebuds Reading Collective (RRC) is a grassroots nonprofit that runs book clubs inside Rikers Jail in New York City. We bring connection, conversation, and community directly to incarcerated people through the power of storytelling.

For over a year now, Rosebuds Reading Collective has been facilitating reading and creative writing programs at Rikers Island. To create a space where people inside could connect, reflect, and imagine new possibilities through reading.

We started with our women's group seven months before establishing the men's program, and in that time we've watched participants encounter themselves in memoir and fiction, in stories of survival and reinvention, in narratives that refuse easy redemption arcs.

Our women's group reads memoirs about education and addiction, survival and self-discovery. Books like Educated, Wild, Push, and The Girls. They've met the authors whose words they've lived with: Tara Westover and Julia Fox have both visited the jail, closing the distance between reader and writer, between page and presence.

These are not just book club meetings.
These are encounters with women who've written themselves into different futures and come back to feel what can be possible.

Our men's group has engaged in identity-based genre fiction (Afrofuturism, magical realism, cyberpunk) alongside texts like Malcolm X's autobiography. They read Junot Díaz, mapping the curses and magic across generations; writing their own origin stories in the language of comic books and speculative fiction. In sessions that move from reading short stories together to creative writing responses, they explore what it means to world-build your own future, to recreate yourself into being.

In both groups, we have created a space for people to do more than read stories. We facilitate the work of becoming storytellers together.
In a place designed to reduce people to numbers and charges, to strip identity down to offense and sentence, we insist on the complexity of existence.

We practice the radical act of recognizing each other as full human beings: people with pasts worth examining, presents worth documenting, futures worth imagining.

Rosebuds Reading Collective is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your gift helps us purchase books, host author visits, and keep our jail-based reading circles thriving. You can donate through the GoFundMe link or email our founder at norafried@gmail.com to arrange a personal check payable to Rosebuds Reading Collective.

Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Fund the Stories That Rewrite Futures

Every dollar you contribute purchases more than just books. It purchases possibility. It pays for the notebooks where someone rewrites their origin story, this time with agency, with magic, with a different ending. It funds the facilitators who hold space for discussions about power, identity, and transformation in a place designed to strip those concepts bare. It creates the conditions where authors can visit, where readers become writers, where stories become bridges between who we've been and who we're becoming.

Your donation:

$25 provides books and materials for one participant for an entire session

$100 funds a complete workshop with readings, discussions, and writing supplies for a small group

$500 sponsors a full cohort through our program, covering books from memoir to speculative fiction, facilitator time, and writing materials

$1,000 helps bring authors into the jail for in-person conversations, transforming the reading experience into direct dialogue

$2,500+ sustains our ongoing presence at Rikers across both programs, ensuring continuous facilitation even as individuals cycle through the system

The people we work with are already doing the labor of transformation. Your contribution ensures they have the tools to complete that work. In a system built on punishment and erasure, we're offering something different: recognition, creative agency, and the radical proposition that everyone deserves access to stories that see them whole.

Donate today and help us prove that the most unrealistic fiction of all is the one where we give up on each other.

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Index ↓

Rosebuds Reading Collective

📚 Reading Syllabus

Women’s Group

📚 Reading Syllabus

Men’s Group