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In 2006, Virginia Commonwealth University English professor David Coogan began teaching a memoir writing class in the Richmond City Jail. The class culminated in a 2015 book, "Writing our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail," which shared the memoirs of 10 prisoners and explored the conditions, traps, and turning points on the path to prison, as well as the redemptive power of writing.

Now, a newly published sequel, "After Jail, Before Freedom," picks up where the first book left off. It continues the story of five of the original co-authors: Kelvin Belton, Stanley Craddock, Ron Fountain, Naji Mujahid, and Dean Turner, as they navigate reentry and contend with the stigma of a felony conviction, racial discrimination, unstable living conditions, addiction, trauma and more.

Coogan recently spoke with VCU News about the new book and his journey.

It seems that service-learning isn't just for students - it's for professors, too.

In my writing classes at VCU, I teach a service-learning class where I connect students with nonprofits such as Offender Aid and Restoration. Students could walk to OAR to do their projects, which were stories of re-entry for a calendar entitled "Faces of Re-entry." The volunteer coordinator told me if I wanted to find out if writing can help people, then I should go teach a writing class in the Richmond City Jail and then follow up with the inmates that took the class when they got out of jail.

Tell us more about "Writing Our Way Out" and "After Jail, Before Freedom."

"After Jail, Before Freedom" is the sequel to "Writing Our Way Out." That first book tells my story of teaching men in jail how to write their life stories as a way of changing their narratives. Ten men were featured in that first book. This new book, co-authored by five of the original 10 men, is about what happened when they got out of jail to start their new lives. I gave them writing prompts based on things they wrote about in the first book. They would write their stories and share them with me. When they were done, I did light editing.

Give us some context for what writing means to your co-authors.

Writing about your life forces you to step outside of the flow of daily life and reflect on where you've been. That was hard for my co-authors, whose daily lives are rife with stress. Lousy jobs. The allure of addiction. Rocky finances. Dicey living situations. But once they got started writing, they could see the progress that they had made in life since being released. They could see themselves and find pride in their accomplishments.

Did you and they have a starting point of sorts, roughly two decades ago?

The criteria were set in the first class at the jail in 2006. You had to want to write your life story as a way of gaining more control over your narrative. You had to want to share with others doing the same. Our personal bonds and sense of shared purpose formed in the old Richmond City Jail. We relied on that to make this new book.

There are a lot of books about problems with American prisons and people doing time but …

We have fewer books about how that experience of prison follows you around after you have been released.

In that vein, share a special insight from "After Jail, Before Freedom."

The first chapter of the book shows me going to visit Dean, one of my co-authors, at his job in Shockoe Bottom when he first got out of jail. When I began researching Shockoe Bottom, I learned that this was once the second-largest area for the slave trade outside of New Orleans. The jail that held enslaved people was once right around the corner from his job. The jail that Dean just got out of was only a mile away. The parallels are not precise, but they haunted me throughout the process of putting this book together. Life after emancipation was a struggle. The bleak opportunities, the disenfranchisement, the racism, the danger. Life after incarceration is much the same. But struggles can be won. I've seen it.

If there is no magic moment of chains breaking and attitudes changing in the writing process, then what?

Writing can help you figure out how to be free. You have to just keep reaching for freedom.

Do you and your co-authors of "After Jail, Before Freedom" feel connected?

We are. When they were locked up, there was more time for a back-and-forth conversation about the book. When everyone was released, it was harder to have that same collaborative experience of writing together, and that is one of the things that is so gratifying about this. I have known these guys for 20 years. A lot of the book is a shared story. It's a story we cannot tell alone. It's a team effort, a camaraderie.

Where can we find "After Jail, Before Freedom" - and what's next?

The book is available in Richmond Shelf Life Books, Fountain Books and Book People - and online at Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Book Shop. We have a book launch scheduled for Sept. 2 at 6 p.m. at the main branch of Richmond Public Library, 101 E. Franklin St. I will be there with my co-authors, and we will be doing a reading and a Q&A.