Tess Wheelwright

Tess Wheelwright is the incoming director of Wesleyan University’s Center for Prison Education (CPE), which has worked since 2009 to bring the transformative power of a liberal arts education to students incarcerated in Connecticut prisons. Previously, Tess was deputy director of Freedom Reads, a Connecticut-based organization launched in 2020 to open its signature Freedom Library in prison dorms and housing units across the country. Before that, she was associate director of curriculum and programming for the Cornell Prison Education Program, for which she also taught English and writing courses.