Blog

This month the team opened Libraries in Missouri and I read from Doggerel in the women’s prison.  Our newest team member, James Davis III, took his first trip in 30 years, to return to a prison after being locked up in one for almost that long.  I left Missouri so early in the morning that even the earliest dragon birds  were still asleep. The night was still run by raccoons and opossums, the creatures that I've learned to love while riding on my 3am treks.  I was at the airport, and it felt like I had walked into a scene from Percy Jackson, because everything was open. Starbucks was open, another coffee shop was open, and a bar was open. That's where I had breakfast. I walked to the bar starving in a way that only a man who has just left a prison knows and I wanted potatoes. “These mornings are familiar,” I say to no one, thinking of all my recent mornings in airports. “I once had a rule, I only drink when I’m awake,” the person beside me said. When I mentioned my poem, Whiskey for Breakfast, the bartender, this dark-haired woman, who stared just about as far as my mom, said, “Now you must read for your breakfast.” She didn't expect me to, but I sang: my liver, awash in all but the dregs of a charred out cask…. 

On October 20, 2025, I was at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in California. Just outside the prison, you can look out and see one of the most beautiful views in the world. Staring out on the bay, near the horizon, the fog slowly lifts and you would be surprised that a prison is within walking distance. Dozens and dozens of us showed up to the second annual San Quentin Film Festival, brought to us by Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, who's spent more than two decades of his life at San Quentin, and his cousin Cori Thomas—who is not really his cousin but is his cousin in the way that prison teaches you the profound ways that we choose our families.

Far too many stories I tell about someone else end up becoming stories I tell about someone allowing me to see myself truer. It’s the tragedy of going to prison as a sixteen-year-old, long before I’d had the experiences or sense of knowing who I was. And still, some of the stories become the best ways to remember the people. When I met Aggie Gund, I was running late. I’d been invited by Elizabeth Alexander to meet with Aggie and a group of others about the beginning of Art for Justice.

During the fall of 2021, I drove down a stretch of highway headed towards MCI-Norfolk, a prison in Massachusetts made famous in part by the years that Malcolm X and other prisoners incarcerated there did their thing on a debate team that battled the likes of Harvard and other elite institutions. I was headed there with my Freedom Reads’ team to open our first Freedom Library. It’s a wondrous thing to do something for the first time, and on that morning, having ridden for two hours in the passenger seat, an open laptop as I wrote about the late Michael K Williams, I struggled with the juxtaposition I’ve lived with since handcuffs first graced my wrists: the possibility and potential of Black men and all the public ways we often die too soon. Williams once told me that his dream was to build a center where young folks who were like he once was, desiring more than the violence and poverty around them, could actively envision better tomorrows and learn dance and acting and what it means to be safe. That is part of my dream for the Freedom Library.

Everyone who has ever been given a state number has a story of a cell door closing. And too often the stories that make it out from behind those closed cell doors are of sorrow. The sorrow of so many become the substance of films and of folklore, of the narratives of men like Malcolm X or Nathan McCall or Petey Greene or Merle Haggard or a half‑a‑dozen men in Bruce Springsteen songs. So many of us with debts no honest man can pay. I think of Susan Burton or Angela Davis or the many women I’ve met as I’ve walked back into prisons, their names less well known, but their struggles no less visceral. And yet, the thing less known than all those stories is how often an open book leads to shifting someone’s life—even for simply the span of time it takes to get from that first page to the last.

Once, I wrote that I met my fathers again. It’s the kind of thing that feels particular to men of my age, who grew up in the wake of the crack epidemic. Some say war on drugs, and I understand this - but it was crack cocaine that left the fathers of my youth’s eyes vacant, from a high of money or the ache of not having it. Inside, I met so many of us, barely older than me or much older, lost inside prisons from all the attendant ways that accumulating weight left us lost: murder, robbery, drug dealing. And inside, when we were sober, no longer fighting over blocks, turning to whatever gave us hope, sometimes, I swear, we saw more possible in each other than Galileo saw in the night sky.

On May 15, the team was in New Jersey at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women for a celebratory day talking about books. The team spread out across the women’s facility – some working with the judges for the Inside Literary Prize, the first major book prize in the United States selected solely by people in prison; some opening more than a dozen Freedom Libraries for those Inside; and, the rest of us helping me prepare to give a poetry reading from my latest poetry collection, Doggerel. We brought the women gifts: the Freedom Edition, a specially published paperback created in partnership with W.W. Norton. See, most prisons do not allow hardback books to enter for safety reasons. The Freedom Edition is a statement of support from my publisher and everyone who donates money that ensures those Inside can read Doggerel at the same time as the rest of us. And quiet as kept, my reading at Edna Mahan was so much joy.

At the end of James Wright’s poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” as he writes about noticing the bronze butterfly, a leaf in green shadow, as he writes about the cowbells, and sunlight between two pines, the golden stones that were once horse droppings, as he writes about the chicken hawk, I’m always utterly gobsmacked by his conclusion: I have wasted my life. And it’s such a startling end to the poem that it’s haunted me for a decade. I’m forty-four years old and watched my first sunrise less than a month ago, and now I am no more than a few hours away from when I was lying in a hammock at someone’s farm, staring at a duck with her ducklings that barely rise above the growing grass, and again I am weeping, and exhausted, and willing to admit that I have not wasted my life.

Dear Reader,

Prison teaches you what it means to be alone and what it means to lean on people who care about you. Inside, we built bonds over fleeting moments, breaking bread over meals, turning books we read into opportunities to see each other more clearly. And we stayed inventing a language of hope: calling letters kites, calling studying doing the math, remembering that one day you’d only have one day and a wake up left. When my confession announced me a convict, when the judge pronounced my sentence, I walked into a cell and called myself a writer. Sometimes it’s just a word that you hold onto until it becomes freedom.

This month, as a team, we returned to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the Legacy Sites. And on this return, we were bringing our new expanded team. We had folks with us who’d not been permitted to go because of probation issues last year and folks who weren’t on our team then. We had family members with us. And we understood that returning to Montgomery, to the site of so many historic struggles for civil rights, was going to be about the hard work of always rejoicing, even when confronted with sorrow.

This is what I know about sadness: it frightens people. One day, you wake up and your world feels filled with the second O of sorrow. This is what my friend Sean Thomas Dougherty might say. He is a white man, who works the night shift and writes beautiful poems about being alive in this cruel world. He once wrote a poem about Biggie Smalls that made me believe he was from my neighborhood. And no matter how sad his songs have been, they make me believe there is a world just past suffering. And when I read him, even when he is suffering between those lines, I imagine the writing has given him some of that place that is more heaven than purgatory.

I remember my first holiday meal in prison. I’d just turned eighteen-years-old a few weeks before, my second of eight birthdays Inside. I was at Southampton Correctional Center in Capron, Virginia. There are still a lot of folks I remember who would have been in the chow hall that day, some I still talk to. Fats, Star, Divine, Smoke. That dinner, they served Cornish hens. I didn’t know what that was then but knew it was delicious. Later found out these hens are juvenile chickens particularly tender for eating.