Executive Director
Travis Sands, PhD
Travis Sands is the founding Executive Director of the Transformation & Reentry through Education & Community (TREC) Program at Metro State University. Under Travis’ leadership, the TREC Program has built both an Academic Reentry and College in Prison program that has expanded to 3 Minnesota prisons where it offers a Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Studies degree to over 100 students each year. In this role, Travis has also worked closely with faculty leaders at Minneapolis College to build the TREC Partnership, a 2+2 associate and bachelor’s degree program launched in 2022 that provides seamless transfer, shared in-facility student support services and co-curricular opportunities, and academic reentry services. Now entering its third year, The TREC Partnership currently serves over 300 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students, has had awarded over 140 associate degrees and almost 70 bachelor degrees, and has a growing group of over 40 students in TRECs academic reentry program. An interdisciplinary scholar of sexuality, race, and political economy, Travis remains active in the classroom and, prior to this current role, served as Gender Studies faculty and the Associate Director of Faculty Development at Metro State.
Grants and Curriculum Coordinator
Emily Oliver, MFA
Emily Oliver is the Grants and Curriculum coordinator for the TREC College-in-Prison Program at Metro State University. In TREC, she teaches Creative Writing and a recurring course on Public Narrative. She received an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review and Prairie Schooner.
Program Coordinators
Julie Santella, MA
Julie is a Program Coordinator for Metro State University’s TREC Program. As Community Faculty, she has taught human geography, college writing, and academic reentry. She holds an MA in geography from the University of Minnesota.
Michael Lee, MFA, Ed.M.
Michael Lee is a Program Coordinator for Metro State University’s TREC program and additionally serves as Community Faculty in the program. He has taught courses at the college level on both the inside and outside in English Literature, Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on race, cultural studies, and modern war. He holds an MFA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Cornell University and an Ed.M in Arts Education from Harvard University.
Reentry Navigator
Tierre Caldwell
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Faculty Coordinator
Isak Tranvik, PhD
Isak Tranvik is an assistant professor of Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies at Metro State University. He currently teaches courses at Metro State’s Saint Paul campus as well its TREC campuses at Lino Lakes and Faribault prisons. His teaching career began in an eighth-grade classroom at Gateway Middle in the St. Louis Public School District. Since then, he has taught courses on democracy and popular politics everywhere from research universities to church basements. Trained as a political theorist, his academic writing has been published in Political Theory, Constellations, Perspectives on Politics, and Comparative Political Studies, among other venues.
Faculty Advisors
Macey Flood, PhD
Macey Flood is an assistant professor of Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies at Metro State University. She teaches core classes as well as courses in science, technology, and health studies for TREC campuses and Metro State’s St. Paul campus. Macey is an interdisciplinary health humanist and cultural historian who works with archival, oral history, and community-embedded methodologies. Her work has been published in Medical Humanities, IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, and in an edited volume through Virginia Tech University Press.
Gemma Punti
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Visiting Scholar and Community Engagement Fellow
Kristin Collier, MFA, M.Ed.
Kristin Collier is a TREC Visiting Scholar and Community Engagement Fellow. Her teaching career began in the New York City public school system, and she has spent the last 20 years teaching Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition courses in the carceral system and at the high school and college level. Her first book, What Debt Demands, focuses on the way that debt shapes the personal and social world. Her essays have been published with Fourth Genre and Longreads, and her work was recently anthologized in Coffee House Press’s American Precariat. Kristin also organizes with the nation’s first debtors’ union, The Debt Collective.
Research Fellow
Will Leaver
Will Leaver is a formerly incarcerated scholar and PhD Student in American Studies at the University of Minnesota whose work examines the existential harms and the afterlife of confinement. His research explores how systems of domination produce unnamed phenomena that shape the lives, identities and possibilities for justice-impacted individuals. He seeks to identify and name these phenomena, predicated on the belief that naming is a necessary step towards confronting, resisting, and transforming the terms of one’s return.
Student Workers
Brett King
Brett King is an Indigenous person enrolled with the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. He is a senior and a student ambassador for the College of Individualized Studies at Metro State University. He is a local advocate who wants to make a difference within the American Indian community. He is justice impacted and wants to help change the narrative about how society views justice impacted people.
Never Hall
Never Wm. M. S Hall is the first born of William, who was the fifth child of John. He is a justice-impacted student, writer, poet, novelist and social activist who has escaped the prison behind the wall and is now working hard to escape the prison beyond the wall. His mission is to stop the unjust life-long ostracization and obfuscation of justice-impacted individuals, a community that includes not only those who have been locked away in jails, hospitals, treatment centers and prisons but also loved ones, family members, friends, and allies who support, live with, and work with these vulnerable people
Brooks Kurr
Having spent eleven years incarcerated, Brooks found empowerment and healing through education, writing, and advocacy, including work with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and The Pillar newspaper. Now pursuing a BA in Individualized Studies at Metropolitan State University, Brooks serves as Vice President of SOLVE and is actively involved as a Student Ambassador, supporting justice-impacted students. The TREC program has been central to Brook’s reentry, restoring his values and providing a platform to champion education as a basic human right.
Andre Anderson
Andre Anderson is the Graduate Student Reentry Coordinator for the TREC program. He graduated with an AA degree from Minneapolis College in 2022 with an emphasis in philosophy and then with a BA degree from Metro State University in 2023 in the College of Individualized Studies focusing on organizational leadership. Now, Andre is a transitioning TREC student working towards an MA degree in advocacy and political leadership in the MAPL program. His passion is helping others and using his free time to distance run.