About Us
Linda Small, Executive Director
Linda Small is the formerly incarcerated founder and executive director of Reentry Sisters and served on the New England Commission for the Future of Higher Education in Prison. She is a Columbia University Women's Collective Leadership Fellow, focusing on changing the impact of the carceral state on women and girls. She is a member of the Justice Scholars Network and Colby College Justice Think Tank, highlighting the scholarship and research of justice-impacted people. She is part of the grant team for the Freedom & Captivity Curriculum Project, developing community-based classes taught by incarcerated people. Linda is a program facilitator for the Maine Humanities Council, serves on the Mass Incarceration Convening Planning Committee in collaboration with state humanities councils, and is a program coordinator for the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition. She is a DJ for Justice Radio, a talk show on WMPG, WERU, and WMHB about the carceral state. Linda holds an MS in Adult and Higher Education. She is part of a collaborative effort to develop a Justice Collective to bring restorative justice practices to Maine, and a member of Healing First!, an abolitionist survivor network.
MacKenzie Kelley, Program Director
Mackenzie is a formerly incarcerated woman in long term recovery. She is completing her bachelor’s degree in business management at the University of Maine at Augusta. MacKenzie is the Recovery Coach Coordinator for Healthy Acadia in Augusta Maine. She is also a teacher’s assistant for inside-out courses through MIT and works for the Maine Prisoner Reentry Center as a peer support and recovery coach. Mackenzie is a DJ for Justice Radio, a talk show on WMPG and WERU about the carceral state.
Board Members
Catherine Besteman
Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. An abolitionist educator, Catherine has built several programs to connect incarcerated community members with outside community members through pedagogical and humanities-based projects. In addition to building Colby's prison education program, Catherine also founded the Freedom & Captivity project, a multiyear initiative which is currently offering community classes taught by incarcerated residents on themes of loss, repair, trauma, healing, liberation and transformative justice. Catherine believes in restorative and transformative justice as the best possible responses to harm and to building safe communities, and is proud to be supporting Reentry Sisters in their mission.
Board Members
Jan Bindas-Tenney
Jan Bindas-Tenney (they/them) is a trans and non-binary facilitator, organizer, writer, reader and parent. They work as a program manager with the Restoring Promise initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice to transform prison cultures, climates and spaces with a commitment to human dignity. Before joining Vera in 2022, Jan worked as a labor and community organizer, an advocacy director, and as coordinator of facilitation and partnerships with the Maine Humanities Council, where they worked closely with system-impacted facilitators and coordinated humanities programs in Maine’s prison facilities. In addition to their work at Vera, Jan is a writer. They were featured in an exhibit of queer artists at SPEEDWELL contemporary called "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." Jan currently lives in Boston with their family.
Board Members
Katrina Hoop
Katrina Hoop, Ph.D. has over 15 years as a faculty member, having taught Sociology to students including those in Maine's prisons. Katrina is a dedicated supporter of reentry organizations that work for a more humane and welcoming world for justice-impacted people. Her research interests include how unlikely coalitions form in social movements and organizations, the role of civic engagement in pedagogy, and community-based learning. She has worked with Maine-based nonprofits and organizations focused on topics such as gender-based violence prevention, youth development, academic programming in immigrant communities and child advocacy.
Board Members
Linda Holtslander
Linda Holtslander received a BA in Journalism from the Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City and a Masters in Library Science from the University of California at Berkeley. She has been an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley and San Jose State University. Holtslander has served as director for community relations and development at metropolitan public library systems in California and Virginia. She was twice awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Helsinki City Library in Finland. While there, she participated in the Next Library initiative, whose main purpose is to share and build knowledge together. She has numerous times received the John Cotton Dana Award from the American Library Association for programming and services which provided: transitional housing for homeless women and families, services to adults with intellectual disabilities and statewide literacy programs. Through grants from LSTA (library services and technology) Linda Holtslander created partnerships which served marginalized populations including juveniles in detention. She has served on the board of directors for LAWS (domestic violence and sexual assault alliance), Project Read (literacy programs for adults and youth) and the Paxton Trust which protects children in need. Holtslander has participated for 6 years in memoir writing classes at the Maine Women’s Correctional Center in Windham. She was awarded the Leon Gorman Volunteer of the Year Award from Preble’s Street in Portland Maine and the New England Patriots’ Myra Kraft Community Award for Volunteerism
Board Members
Erica King
Erica King, MSW, is a Senior Manager with the Center for Effective Public Policy. She directs the National Resource Center for Justice Involved Women. She develops pathways to increased safety and well-being with and for directly impacted women, nonbinary people, staff, and systems working with them. Before joining CEPP, Erica worked for two decades as a Senior Policy Associate at the University of Southern Maine and consultant with Orbis Partners, leading efforts to strengthen trauma-informed, gender-responsive, evidence-based policy and practice strategies. Erica is a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, co-leading Freedom & Captivity, an inside-outside public humanities curriculum on the themes of accountability, forgiveness, liberation, and healing. Erica brings hard knowledge into her relational work with people to inform how data and lived experience can drive meaningful conversations and intentional decisions to improve community health, well-being, and vitality.
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Board Members
Mira Ptacin
Mira Ptacin is an award-winning memoirist, literary journalist, educator, and activist whose work centers on women’s stories, justice, and transformation. She is the author of the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul (Soho Press), a memoir about grief and reproductive choice, and The In-Betweens (WW Norton-Liveright), a genre-blending exploration of spiritualism and feminist history in Maine. Her narrative journalism appears in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, Longreads,The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, The Atavist, and more. For over thirteen years, Mira taught memoir writing at the Maine Correctional Center, guiding incarcerated women to reclaim their voices through narrative. Her teaching combines literary rigor with a deep belief in the power of storytelling as a tool for healing and justice. She has also served as visiting professor of creative nonfiction at Colby College and the University of New Hampshire, Stonecoast, the Writing Workshops (USA, Paris, and Ireland), and is a mentor for the Young Emerging Authors at The Telling Room in Portland, Maine. Mira is a fierce advocate for reproductive justice, incarcerated women’s rights, and narrative equity. She lives on Peaks Island, Maine, with her family, where she continues to write, teach, and amplify marginalized voices through her work as a literary journalist, ghostwriter, editor, and book-doula.
Board Members - Education Subcommittee
Colleen Coffey
Colleen Coffey, M.S.Ed is an Education Equity and Advancement Coordinator tasked with expanding education programming across seven prisons in Maine in partnership with the Maine Community College System. Additionally, Colleen partners with Maine employers large and small to inform training practices and provide pathways to quality employment for those preparing to be released from prison. She has been working with justice-impacted people for nearly ten years as a reentry coach, educator, and tireless advocate. She is deeply committed to building bridges to education, employment, and wellbeing, post-release. Colleen is currently writing her PhD dissertation researching the forms of capital used by incarcerated women who were college students which they relied on in order to continue to enroll in school post-release.
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