We had a busy February with over 440 packages sent out to incarcerated people in Mississippi!

To close out the month, we had a wonderful collaborative volunteer session with 601 For Period Equity where 30 volunteers (many first timers) showed up and packed books and period supplies for incarcerated Mississippians! See highlights below.

We are happy to report that 2023 started off strong, with over 400 packages mailed out in January! That’s 1,200+ books in the hands of incarcerated people in Mississippi!

The last Sunday of January, we had 18 volunteers, many of whom were first timers. They shelved all of our book donations and filled all of our current requests, including requests for our monthly subscribers. These requests just need to be logged in our database, so we can print invoices and shipping labels and mail them out. If you’d like to help us log these requests, come by our location at 133 Millsaps Ave.  this Monday (1/30) and Thursday (2/2) from 5-7 p.m.

As many of you know, postage prices went up this month. Please donate if you can. We don’t want rising prices to stop us from continuing the great work YOU have helped us accomplish!

For those who want to donate books, we’ll be posting an updated needs list soon. Stay tuned!

We are taking a break from our book packing parties for the holidays. Join us on Sunday, January 8th from 12-2 p.m. for our next party. Happy Holidays!

In addition to our regular Sunday book packing party, we will have a special session on Saturday, December 10th from 2-4 p.m. We have lots of books to mail before we take a break for the holidays, so join us if you can!

Thanks to our wonderful supporters, we raised over $1,700 for Giving Tuesday! We are so excited to replenish our postage fund with your generous donations. Thank you! Thank you!

This month we sent out over 360 books to incarcerated people in Mississippi! We had several dozen student volunteers from Millsaps College who helped pack, log, and fill book requests. We were glad to see a few new faces and a few of our regulars this month. Thank you for taking time out of your busy holiday schedules to give back to Mississippi’s underserved populations. We couldn’t do this without you!

Thanks to Theresa and Nathan for braving the cold with us for the Clinton Holiday Market. This was our last market of the season, and we thoroughly enjoyed meeting new supporters and spreading the good news of Big House Books!

December marks 8 years of protecting the right to read in Mississippi’s prisons. Big House Books is the only books-to-prisons group in the state of Mississippi, so we are happy to still be going and growing. Come out and celebrate with us at Urban Foxes on Saturday, December 3rd. We will have giveaways, merchandise for sale, and we’ll be taking book and monetary donations. Urban Foxes is also offering a 15% discount to anyone who donates to our postage fund. We hope to see you there!

Help us reach our goal of $2500 this Giving Tuesday. Go to the Donate page on our website and contribute what you can. Every $5 allows us to send one package of books to an incarcerated person in Mississippi.

Another productive month at Big House Books. We sent out over 950 books this month and saw about 40 first-time volunteers!

We were honored to host a number of students from Millsaps College this month. Professor Kristen Golden’s Philosphy of Happiness class joined us at the beginning of the month for three volunteer sessions, where they were able to fill requests, organize our book donations, and pack books to send out. We closed out the month with the guys of the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma fraternities (pictured above), who packed over 250 books at our book packing party!

Thanks to Holly for delivering books to the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility. These books will help stock their prison library, allowing more incarcerated Mississippians to have access to a diverse selection of gently used, up-to-date books for FREE.