Today on Hard Knock Radio, we explore incarceration, survival, and the role of art as a pathway home. Across the country, millions are trapped inside systems designed to punish and disappear. What often goes unseen are the stories, creativity, and humanity that endure”and the steep terrain of returning to a society that rarely makes room for reentry, healing, or accountability.
This conversation centers the Formerly Incarcerated Peoples Performance Project (FIPPP), a groundbreaking collective that creates space for formerly incarcerated people to tell their own stories”on their own terms. Through performance, storytelling, and community care, FIPPP challenges dominant narratives about crime, punishment, and who is deemed worthy of redemption.
Joining us are two FIPPP performers whose lives and work embody the intersection of truth, resilience, and artistic reclamation. Anthony Michael Jefferson”AJ”spent 23 years incarcerated in California. Since his release, he has become a chef, actor, and writer whose work centers discipline, freedom, and the reclamation of narrative through art. AJ reflects on how the ocean taught him about freedom long before prison, what it took to survive decades inside CDCR, and why theater became the language he needed to finally tell his story.
We are also joined by Pharaoh Brooks”an artist, writer, musician, and reentry leader who returned home in November 2023. Pharaoh now serves as Director of the Alcohol and Drug Treatment Project at Dream Center Transitional Home, grounding his leadership in lived experience, accountability, and community care. He speaks to the challenges of reentry, living his amends, protecting ones spirit while revisiting trauma through art, and why music and poetry are essential tools for telling the truth about incarceration.
Together, AJ and Pharaoh reflect on why it is essential that formerly incarcerated people tell their own stories, what art offers that policy reform alone cannot, how accountability and healing can coexist, and what the public fundamentally misunderstands about reentry. This is not just a conversation about performance”it is about dignity, responsibility, and how systems of incarceration ultimately touch us all.
The Formerly Incarcerated Peoples Performance Project (FIPPP) Performance Festival runs January 15th through January 18th at Berkeley Rep. The festival features five unique shows over four days, with multiple solo performances, short films by documentary filmmaker Jim Granato, and post-show panel discussions moderated by Bay Area theatre luminaries Dan Hoyle, Wayne Harris, and Mark McGoldrick. Twelve formerly incarcerated performers”stand-up comedians, TEDx speakers, Moth winners, Shakespeare actors, Marsh performers, and SF Fringe Festival artists”share powerful stories of incarceration and reinvention.
Tickets and more information: fippp.org
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.