Twenty-four hard-core inmates, mostly lifers, took on a rare, even perilous, challenge on a maximum-security prison yard when they sat down in a unique creative writing experiment to learn to express themselves openly and honestly, many for the first time in their lives, to a group of strangers, in a setting where survival often demands alienation, disaffection, even violence. For 14 weeks, inmates sat across from 12 college “mentors” who were there as much to observe as to instruct about these men’s deepest feelings and most closely guarded emotions. The inmates, initially apprehensive at the prospect of a vulnerability they had never known, learned to trust, to explore, and to share in ways foreign to most. And the students, equally apprehensive, even hateful at first, discovered that the men across from them were far from the callous and unfeeling monsters they had expected to meet deep inside prison walls. Through their often intimate and unmonitored interactions, both groups found hope and humanity in a place where they had expected to find neither.