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Mikita Brottman

Biography

Mikita Brottman

Mikita Brottman, PhD, is an Oxford-educated scholar, author and psychoanalyst. She has written seven previous books, including THE GREAT GRISBY: Two Thousand Years of Literary, Royal, Philosophical, and Artistic Dog Lovers and Their Exceptional Animals, and is a professor of humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and continues with her weekly reading group at Jessup Correctional Institution.

Mikita Brottman

Books by Mikita Brottman

The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison
by Mikita Brottman - Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club with a group of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. She assigns them 10 dark, challenging classics that don’t flinch from evoking the isolation of the human struggle, the pain of conflict and the cost of transgression. Although Brottman is already familiar with these works, the convicts open them up in completely new ways. Their discussions may “only” be about literature, but for the prisoners, everything is at stake.