C. Fausto Cabrera is a writer, visual artist, and restorative justice practitioner whose work examines incarceration, transformation, and the ethics of repair through language, material process, and lived experience. As a writer, Cabrera’s poetry and prose have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Idaho Review, Water~Stone Review, and other literary journals. He is the co-author, with photographer Alec Soth, of Parameters of Our Cage, a book that interrogates confinement, authorship, and human dignity through image and text. In 2024, Cabrera’s work was published in the MLA Teaching Writing and Literature in Prison Anthology, contributing to national conversations on pedagogy, access, and the legitimacy of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers within academic spaces. His writing consistently blurs the line between testimony and craft, insisting that lived experience is not supplementary to literature, but central to it.

As a visual artist, Cabrera works across drawing, painting, photography, and handmade paper, often incorporating legal documents, institutional records, and other remnants of carceral life into the physical substrate of his work. In 2019, his artwork appeared as the cover image for Washington Post Magazine, anchoring a national issue focused on incarceration with an image shaped from inside the system it examined.

His ongoing Inherited Scars collection transforms shredded legal paperwork—sentencing documents, denials, grievances—into handmade paper that serves as the ground for portraiture and mark-making. The series treats material not as metaphor alone, but as evidence: history unmade and remade without being erased. The first ten canvases of Inherited Scars—created after Cabrera’s release following more than two decades of incarceration—were exhibited through the local art scene at the Weisman Art Museum and Cargill Gallery. These works marked both a personal threshold and a public arrival, establishing a visual language rooted in patience, restraint, and sustained proximity rather than spectacle. The pieces function as slow witnesses, deepening in meaning as they are encountered over time by viewers in recovery, transition, and reflection.

Alongside his creative practice, Cabrera is deeply engaged in social justice and restorative work. He is a Fellow of the Common Justice Practitioners Lab, where he works in collaboration with the Transformative Justice Alliance to advance community-centered responses to harm. His work emphasizes accountability without disposability and repair without erasure, drawing from both formal restorative frameworks and the informal governance structures that emerge inside carceral spaces. Cabrera also works with the Minnesota Youth Diversion Program, supporting alternatives to prosecution that center healing, responsibility, and community safety. He currently serves as Director of Transformative Justice at Damascus Way Re-Entry and Recovery Center, where he develops programming at the intersection of art, narrative, and reentry. In this role, he treats creative practice not as an add-on, but as infrastructure—an essential mechanism for identity repair, self-authorship, and long-term stability. Across disciplines, Cabrera’s work is unified by a refusal to flatten complexity. Whether through a poem, a handmade paper surface, or a facilitated dialogue, his practice asks what it means to live forward without denying what came before. His work insists that transformation is not a performance, but a process—slow, embodied, and earned. cfausto.art

The McKnight Foundation generously enables Forecast to provide Professional Development Grants for mid-career artists seeking to expand their work in the field of public art. Forecast mid- and early-career grants are designed to support independent projects, leadership development, professional development, risk-taking, multidisciplinary approaches, and collaborative problem-solving in the field of public art.