When She Walked Through the Door Again: Women on return, healing, and reclamation after incarceration (90-MINUTES)
Kirsten Gettys Downs, Monica Cooper, Rhonda Hall, and Iletha Murdaugh
Stories from formerly incarcerated women and how they manage life outside with grave difficulty and few resources.
Community Gallery
Maryland Center for History and Culture
610 Park Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21201

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For many women, release from incarceration is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a new set of challenges: finding stable housing, securing employment, reconnecting with children and family, accessing health care, and navigating systems that often continue to define them by their record rather than their humanity. This session will center the voices of formerly incarcerated women who have lived these realities. Through personal reflection, honest dialogue, and practical insight, the conversation will explore what reentry looks like for women. Join us for an unflinching conversation led by women who have lived through Maryland’s carceral system and emerged not broken, but fighting. This conversation is not only about what women endure after incarceration. It is also about what they build: families, organizations, movements, and new pathways forward. Participants will hear about: the realities of reentry for women in Maryland, barriers related to employment, housing, parenting, and health the role of stigma, trauma, and gender in shaping women’s post-incarceration experiences the importance of lived experience in policy and advocacy work: Who should attend: Advocates, educators, policymakers, community leaders, students, and readers and writers interested in story, justice, and healing. Kirsten Gettys Downs is the Director of Systemic Reform at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender and the Coordinator of the Maryland Justice Partnership, leading statewide efforts to advance equitable justice. A former district public defender and nonprofit executive, she brings deep experience in advocacy, collaboration, and transforming systems to center community needs. Monica Cooper is the founder and Executive Director of the Maryland Justice Project and a member of the Maryland Democratic State Central Committee. A Sandtown-Winchester native and University of Baltimore graduate, she is a formerly incarcerated leader whose advocacy and solar entrepreneurship center on women, community power, and second chances. Rhonda R. Hall is a Baltimore-born healthcare professional, Patient Access Coordinator at the University of Maryland Medical System, and author of Crowned in the Streets. After 26 years of incarceration, she now balances work, study, and caregiving while writing a memoir about struggle, redemption, and healing. Iletha Murdaugh is a survivor, peer recovery specialist in training, and reentry advocate who spent 17½ years at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. She now works at a treatment center and shares her story to support people returning from addiction and incarceration.

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CityLit Project in partnership with Maryland Center for History and Culture present Bearing Witness: Literature as a Revolutionary Act. This celebration of the arts showcases a bevy of leading poets and writers on April 11, 2026. We’re talking fiction, nonfiction, poetry galore, and ways to up the ante on your craft.

Download the CityLit Festival: Bearing Witness flyer with the schedule.

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