7 Teaching Ovid to Incarcerated Students: An Experiential Analysis Nicole Dib and Olga Faccani Introduction A poem about basketball, a short story about the Yukon, and an essay about a weasel are among the topics and genres featured in the “Foundations in the Humanities” prison correspondence course fa- cilitated by the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (hereafter, IHC). The first iteration of the course was offered to students at the California Men’s Colony and Kern Valley State Prison; it has since expanded to Salinas Valley State Prison, Soledad Correctional Training Facility, and other locations. These correspon- dence courses are taught by 6–10 graduate students at UCSB, who apply to be IHC Graduate Teaching Fellows and take a course on pedagogy, prison teaching, and the politics surrounding prisons alongside their correspondence work with students in California prisons. From September 2017 to June 2018, we worked as teaching fellows for “Foundations in the Humanities.” As part of the course, students in prison read and responded to questions about six different works, one of which was Ovid’ s myth titled “Baucis and Philemon.” Ovid’s “Baucis and Philemon” travels far over the course of “Foundations in the Humanities”; like Jupiter and his son Mercury, it seeks to be welcomed as it is sent to our students in California prisons and correctional facilities. Our students’ engagement with this classical text is clear from their keen responses to it, but teaching the corre- spondence course made us reflect on our pedagogy and our practice. After a brief introduction on the way the correspondence course worked, we will first explore our students’ reactions to Ovid’s tale and then our own teaching experience, with special attention to the context of a correspondence course that did not include in-person interactions with students.