Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods of Ear Hustle with Erin O’Toole

Hear from Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods on how art and photography led to their founding of Ear Hustle, the first podcast created and produced in prison. Ear Hustle launched in 2017, featuring stories of the daily realities of life inside California’s San Quentin State Prison, shared by those living it. The podcast now tells stories from inside prison and from the outside, post-incarceration. This conversation will be moderated by SFMOMA’s curator and head of photography Erin O’Toole.

About the Speakers

Nigel Poor is a visual artist whose work explores the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. She is also a professor of photography at California State University, Sacramento. In 2011, Nigel got involved with San Quentin State Prison as a volunteer teacher for Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project). She is the co-creator and co-host of the Pulitzer Prize nominated prison-based podcast Ear Hustle and the co-author of This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life (Crown Publishing).

Earlonne Woods was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. At the age of 17, he was sentenced to 10 years in state prison. In 1997, after two years out on parole, he was arrested again, and sentenced to 31-years-to-life for attempted second-degree robbery under California’s Three Strikes Law. While incarcerated at San Quentin, he and Nigel Poor, a volunteer at the prison, began the podcast Ear Hustle. Today, the podcast has been downloaded over 80 million times, and has received honors from the duPont-Columbia Awards, the Southern Center for Human Rights, and the Peabody Awards. In 2020, it was one of three finalists for the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting. He and Poor are co-authors of the book, This is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life, published by Crown Publishing Group. In November of 2018, after 21 years of incarceration, Earlonne’s sentence was commuted to time served by California Governor Jerry Brown. He currently resides in Oakland, California, and continues to advocate for abolishing California’s Three Strikes Law.

Accessibility Information

Accessible seating is available at this event. Please email publicengagement@sfmoma.org for additional information.
 

Support for Public Programs and Artist Talks at SFMOMA is provided by the Phyllis C. Wattis Distinguished Lecture Series.