The first time I went to Puerto Rico, my oldest son, Micah—who just turned eighteen this month—was still in grade school. His little brother Miles wasn’t yet a year old. It was 2012 and I would have never imagined Freedom Reads, an organization that believes literature is a conduit to the kind of joy I felt watching my oldest play with his little brother walking distance from one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever traversed. The clarity of the water, the way the waves half-washed all the years of prison I’d known. I was there for a conference, and prison was somehow both the furthest thing from my mind and the closest thing on it. Because that’s how it’s been since March 4th, 2005: no matter the city, no matter the coast, every place I’ve been has circled back to prison, or to the long shadow of my relationship with it.
But a few weeks ago, I returned to Puerto Rico and it felt different. I carried poems I’d written in English and translated into Spanish by my own hand. Years ago, a young man named Snoopy, from El Salvador, his body marked with the history of gangs, looked at me—a stranger, vulnerable, fragile—and saw someone worth defending. Later, when the smoke cleared and friendship made us kin, I tried to talk to him and his friends. Some only spoke Spanish, and my Spanish was nonexistent. So I told myself I would learn.
Five years later, I finally picked up a high school-level Spanish textbook and began the slow ritual: copying lessons out longhand, doing every assignment, spending hours each day wrestling with a language that wasn’t mine, trying to earn my way into conversation.
So returning to Puerto Rico felt like an honor. I’m humbled to walk into a prison with a team of people who believe going inside to bring light and joy is a civic duty, a way of giving back. Maybe it was Cervantes who first understood that the mind is the labyrinth that when visited guarantees freedom. I know that when we return to a place I once believed was a labyrinth of suffering, I am astounded by what I remember: all the hope, care, and joy that kept me pushing. In Puerto Rico, I re-discovered the small freedom that comes from being able to speak—however imperfectly—in someone else’s tongue. I was more nervous than I’ve been in a long time, knowing I would stand before a group of men and women and try to sing songs in a language I’m still learning, hoping the poems carried the same heartbeat as if I’d written them in the language I grew up speaking.
And the powerful thing is this: maybe thirty minutes in, when I finally let my mind drift back into English, I could hear it—the laughter, the responses, the applause. I could see people singing their appreciation. Words I struggled to shape in Spanish became poems they heard in their own cadence. And in that moment, in that room, it felt like a new kind of freedom—discovering a language, yes, but discovering a way to be understood.
Read the press release here.