About the Authors

(Unless otherwise indicated, prizes mentioned below were awarded in the PEN Prison Writing Contest.)

William Aberg (b.1957) grew up in Maryland, from where he fled to the Southwest to escape arrest for a series of drug-acquiring crimes. Caught and imprisoned in Arizona, he entered Richard Shelton’s writers’ workshop, which transformed his life. “Many of my poems are extreme icons of emotional exile: separation, hopelessness, needle and spoon. Others arise from humor or reverie, or a combination of the two. Ultimately, they arrive out of necessity.” He earned an A. A. degree from Pima College in Tucson. His first sentence, from 1979 to 1984, an era of revitalization in prison programming, contrasted sharply with his second (for possession of World War I rifles) from 1994 to 1997. “The deadness in the eyes, the psychic numbness, of prisoners and staff was appalling.”

“Reductions” won first prize in poetry in 1982. The Listening Chamber, published by the University of Arkansas Press, won the University of Arkansas Poetry Award. A Russophile and amateur photographer in the Washington D.C. area, Aberg played bass in local bands, and continues to write poems and short stories. He is currently living in a Maryland nursing home.

J. C. Amberchele was born in Philadelphia in 1940 and attended a Quaker school, then colleges in Pennsylvania and New York, before earning a B.A. in psychology. “A drug trafficker for fifteen years,” by his own account, he has served time in a Mexican federal prison as well as in Colorado and Minnesota. He began writing early in his sentence, borrowing instruction books from the prison library. “Writing began for me as a desire to be heard, to be accepted, but soon moved into a form of self-discovery that became mind-opening,” he says. With fellow prisoners in the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, he helped to start a literary magazine and writers’ workshop, which, along with other programs, were canceled in 1992. After immersing himself in Christian mysticism and Buddhism, he discovered the “Headless Way,” developed by the British philosopher Douglass Harding.

Published in Quarterly West, Writer’s Forum, Blue Mesa, Portland Review, and Oasis, Amberchele won three fiction prizes, for “The Ride” (1990), “Melody” (1992) and “Mel” 1993. These pieces and others became the novel How to Lose (2002), which was translated and published in France as Le Prix a Payer. His commitment to Douglas Harding’s work is displayed in his two non-dual spirituality books. The Light that I am and The Almighty Mackerel and His Holy Bootstraps.

“Born in St. Louis (1953–2002) and raised in New Mexico, I was passing through California when I shot someone during an eighty-dollar bungled burglary and found myself a permanent resident,” Stephen Wayne Anderson wrote from San Quentin’s condemned row, where he was sent in 1981. “That residency grows short; my lease is coming due.” Having ignored education as a youth, he made up for it in prison. His favorites: Emerson, Dickinson, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Coleridge, and Stephen King. “I received a book whose footnotes were all in Latin and became thoroughly pissed off. I invested in a Latin course so as to read them. By the time I taught myself enough of the basics I no longer had the book which had caused my original motivation.”

“Conversation with the Dead” won first prize in poetry in 1990; “Friday Crabs” won second prize in poetry in 1991. “We carry imminent destruction with us constantly,” Anderson said. “We eat, sleep and breathe death.” But he also wrote, “A sentence of death made me realize the value of life, and of living.” And “As I walk to that greater darkness, I will go wearing chains. Their chains. Not mine.” When he received his execution date in 2002, his lawyers mounted a powerful clemency appeal, and members of PEN wrote letters on his behalf, to no avail. Anderson refused to see anyone in his last days so he could compose himself privately. The Captain who oversaw the row told the Los Angeles Times that Anderson walked to his death with remarkable dignity.

Scott Antworth (b.1965) was born and raised in Augusta, Maine. After serving four years in the army, he was arrested in 1987 and served time until 2003. While in prison, he earned a B.A. in social sciences from the University of Maine.

Antworth’s “Lawn Sale of Truth” tied for third place in fiction in 1997. “The Tower Pig” took first prize in 1999, and “Shortimer’s Sunrise” tied for second place in 2000. “I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember,” he says, “but only started getting serious at it a few years ago, when some wonderful guidance transformed what would otherwise have been empty time.” He names Hemingway, Paul Theroux, and Jaimee Wriston Colbert as having had the greatest impact on him. His work has appeared in Flying Horse and in two collections—Trapped Under the Ice (1995) and Frontiers of Justice Vol. 2 (1998)—published by the Biddle Publishing Company.

Release in 2003 presented Antworth with an identity crisis. He had to “invent a life from ground zero.” He has held a number of jobs, “mostly working as a social worker or cook.” He currently works on “being worth a damn to others,” and is edging toward writing again. He considers himself “truly blessed” with “a wife I love very much and a dog that is my closest confidant.”

Jimmy Santiago Baca (b.1952) was born in Santa Fe to Chicano and “de-tribalized Apache” parents. His story is an emblematic tale of redemption in prison—and literacy is the liberating force. Even when he was in the hole, he read Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda. Writing gave him “a place to stand for the first time in my life.”

His memoir, A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, describes a wrenching pilgrim’s progress from loss, degradation, and crime, to literacy and spiritual self-discovery, which shares much with the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Writing, he claims, enabled him “to rise from a victim of a barbarous colonization to a man in control of his life.” Baca once said, “All of us who went to prison were lied to, and poetry is the only thing that didn’t lie. Everything that is not a lie is poetry. In order to bring order to our world, we were forced to write. Writing was the only thing that could relieve the pain of betrayal, the only thing that filled the void of abandonment.”

In 1976 his poem, “Letters come to prison,” won an honorable mention. A few years later, with Denise Levertov’s help, he published Immigrants in Our Own Land. In 1988 his novel in verse, Martin, and Meditations on the South Valley, received the Before Columbus American Book Award for poetry. For more than thirty years he has made his living by writing, and has authored more than a dozen volumes of poetry and prose at the time of this publication. His many awards include a Wallace Stevens Yale Poetry Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the National Hispanic Heritage Award, the International Award, and he has been Champion of the International Poetry Slam.

For many years, he ran his own school for writers; his students stay in New Mexico for a year or more, and study writing with Baca while also working in the community, painting, landscaping, or teaching lit-eracy. In 2004 he launched Cedar Tree, a nonprofit literary organization designed to provide writing workshops, training, and outreach programs for at-risk youth, prisoners and ex-prisoners, and disadvantaged communities. Baca has three sons and has said that he helps support “about ten adopted children.” His son Gabriel is planning to make a documentary called A Place to Stand.

Allison Blake (b.1947) was born and raised in Manhattan. Incarcerated for a white-collar crime, she began to write creatively for the first time in Hettie Jones’ writing workshop at Bedford Hills. Her poem “Prisons of Our World” was published in Aliens At The Border. She also received her state legal research certificate, and later at Albion Correctional Facility, became the first inmate to teach the state legal research course; 90% of her students passed the state exam as compared with 33% previously. Her play “Jailhouse Lawyers,” born out of her own experiences, won third prize in drama in 1996. She published other poems in Concrete Garden and A Muse to Follow (National Library of Poetry, 1996). She now works for a lawyer as a paralegal and is involved in real estate development. Her impulse to write seeming to have expired with her sentence, she now makes digital art. She still lives with the man who stood by her while she did time. Allison Blake is a pen name.

Kathy Boudin (b.1943) was raised in New York by social activist parents, her mother a poet, her father a civil liberties lawyer. Graduating from Bryn Mawr in the 1960s, she commenced a life of social commitments, participating in movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. She co-wrote a welfare rights manual and a legal self-defense guide. Incarcerated in 1981 at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, she received a Masters in Literacy Education from Norwich University, Vermont.

Along with other women, Boudin created a program on long-distance parenting and published Parenting from inside/out: Voices of mothers in prison. She applied Paolo Freire’s principle of learning by analysis and action (fromJPedagogy of the Oppressed) to the teaching of basic literacy. The AIDS Counseling and Education Project, initiated by incarcerated women in the community, resulted in Breaking the Walls of Silence: Women and AIDS in a Maximum Security Prison, a collaborative history with a manual that was widely distributed in prisons. After the Pell grants for prisoners were abolished, Boudin and other prisoners collaborated to engage private colleges and the Westchester community to construct a new college program inside the prison.

While Boudin was in prison, her son, Chesa, was a source of strength and inspiration for her work. “Writing in prison,” she wrote, “was a way of discovering self and of overcoming the isolation of prison, sharing knowledge and insights with those beyond the prison fences.” Boudin wrote in academic journals such as The Harvard Education Review, Women and Therapy, and several publications of the American Correctional Association on parenting and adult literacy. She participated in poetry workshops with Hettie Jones, and in 1999, she won the First Prize for the PEN Prison Writing in Poetry Award.

Released from prison in 2003 after twenty-two years, Boudin works at the Center for Comprehensive Care at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center, where she is involved in the Coming Home Program that provides health care for people returning from prison. She continues her work with adolescents whose parents are incarcerated through the program Teen College Dreams, which was designed to strengthen their development and aspirations. And she supports those who, in spite of personal transformation, have little chance of being granted parole at the expected release date: she serves on a committee for parole reform and a restorative justice project with people inside. With others she researched the recidivism and life experience of long-termers in prison. She is a member of Our Journey, an organization for formerly incarcerated women and serves on the board of Citizens Against Recidivism.

Boudin completed her doctoral degree in education at Columbia University Teachers College in May of 2007. Her doctoral thesis examined the challenges faced by adolescents with mothers in prison. She is currently the director of The Criminal Justice Initiative: Supporting Children, Families and Communities, based at Columbia University School of Social Work. She works to focus attention throughout Columbia University on issues of mass incarceration and reentry.

Baltimore-born Larry Bratt (b.1943) writes, “I started conscious life as a student and progressed to soldier to criminal to writer.” While serving a life sentence in Maryland, he has worked as a literacy tutor and facilitator for the Touchstones Discussions Project, a program that teaches prisoners critical thinking. He has said, “There is no greater gift one can give to another than the power of reading and writing.” Bratt attributes the beginning of his self-rehabilitation to the discovery of yoga. He was drawn to Buddhism, later to the teachings of Sai Baba.

Bratt reports that his activism has led to at least fifteen transfers over the years. But he and four other inmates succeeded in organizing Extra Legalese Group, Inc., a think tank dedicated to crime prevention policy. The five men have a combined total of 150 years of experience in the Maryland and federal criminal justice and penal systems. They recently developed a Peace Initiative designed to persuade gang members to drop their violent initiation rituals.

Daughter of a white Episcopalian minister active in civil rights, Texan Marilyn Buck (1947–2010) became politically active when she was eighteen, awakened by movements to end the war in Vietnam and fight oppression of black people in the U.S. Later she actively supported anti-imperialist struggles and the black liberation movement.

In 1973, convicted of purchasing handgun ammunition, she was given a ten-year sentence. Four years in federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, forged her lifelong identification with political prisoners, especially those from the Puerto Rican Independence movement. Granted a furlough, she went underground. Eight years later she was convicted of several politically-motivated conspiracies and acts, including the freeing of Assata Shakur (who has political asylum in Cuba) and attacks on the U.S. military establishment. Later she was tried with five others of conspiring to bomb the capitol building; Buck and two others pleaded guilty in exchange for the government’s dropping charges against, and getting medical care for, Alan Berkman, who was battling life-threatening cancer. Her sentences added up to eighty years.

“For prisoners, writing is a life raft to save one from drowning in a prison swamp.I could not write a diary or a journal,” she wrote. “I was a political prisoner. Everything I had was subject to investigation, invasion and confiscation. In defiance I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly.” At Dublin Federal Correctional Institution, she earned a B.A. in psychology from the New College, and an M.A. in Poetics.

Buck’s essay “Censored Women Speak” tied for third prize in nonfic-tion (1992) and was published in Phoebe. “Clandestine Kisses” appeared with other work of hers in a special issue of Concrete Garden, devoted to women. Among her collections of poetry is Rescue the Word (2002). After winning first prize in poetry in 2001 and second prize in 2002, she earned a master’s degree in poetics. In 2008, City Lights published her translation of Estado de exilio/State of Exile, a volume of poetry by Cristina Peri Rossi, who fled the Uruguayan military dictatorship in the 1970s. In her introduction, Buck calls herself a “translator in exile of a translator of exile.”

In 2009, she was diagnosed with aggressive uterine cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy came too late to save her life. Granted compassionate release in July 2010, she paroled to Brooklyn, New York, where she lived for twenty days surrounded by friends, calling herself “the most fortunate woman alive.” Large memorial meetings in her honor were held in Austin, Texas, San Francisco, and New York.

In Brooklyn, New York, Judith Clark (b.1947) became deeply involved in social protest movements in her teens. “Unwilling to heed the moderating influences of aging, changing conditions, or even motherhood,” she says, she was arrested in 1981 for participating in an attempted robbery of a Brinks truck, in which three people were killed. She is serving a sentence of seventy-five years to life in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

“In prison, faced with the deadly and destructive consequences of violence and group-think, and groping for a way to reclaim my humanity and sustain a relationship with my child, I discovered the power of the word, first through reading and then through writing.”

Clark earned her B.A. and her M. A. at BHCF and helped to rebuild a college program when public funds were rescinded. She recently received her certification as a chaplain and currently works with the nursery mothers and raises service dogs for returning veterans in the Puppies Behind Bars program. She teaches pre-natal and parenting classes to pregnant women and new mothers who live with their babies in the prison’s nursery program. Her articles on mothers in prison have appeared in The Prison Journal and From Zero to Three.

Much of Clark’s work comes from her attempt to reckon with and take responsibility for her crime. “To Vladimir Mayakovsky” won second prize in poetry in 1993. “Write A Poem That Makes No Sense” won first prize in 1995 and was published in Prison Life. “After My Arrest” was published in the New Yorker. IKON, Global City Review, and Aliens at the Border have also published her poems.

Her scholarly work includes pieces in The Prison Journal and Zero to Three. She is co-author of Breaking the Walls of Silence: Women and AIDS in a Maximum Security Prison, about the AIDS Counseling and Education Program at Bedford.

Her “Reflections on Prison as Community” appeared in The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2010.

When Bronx-born Chuck Culhane (b. 1944) and two other prisoners were being transported from Auburn Prison to court in 1968, one prisoner killed a deputy and lost his own life. Culhane and the third prisoner, Gary McGivern, were convicted of felony murder and sentenced to death. After the Supreme Court abolished the capital punishment laws in 1972, Culhane and McGivern refused a plea to manslaughter and were sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Released in 1992 with a B.A., Culhane completed a Master’s in American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and taught a criminal justice course there. He also conducted a writing workshop in Attica, and served as vice president of Western New York Peace Center’s Prison Action Committee, an outgrowth of Sister Helen Prejean’s visit to Buffalo.

Since then, Culhane says, “I worked a year and a half at Prisoners Legal Services, did 39 months for two parole violations for smoking dope, edited an anti-war anthology of mostly local poets and song-makers (Waging Words for Peace) and a small book of poems called SHHHH by residents at a woman’s halfway house.” He serves on several boards concerning prisoners’ rights. “I currently work one day a week at my late friend Sister Karen’s halfway house for (male) parolees, and one day a week at Legal Aid Society. As I am one who has been rescued by others (from death and imprisonment), I am ready and willing to help in the rescue of others. At the request of Sara Kunstler I will help organize a local commemoration for the 40th anniversary of the Attica uprising and slaughter. I live alone with my two kitties, Inky and Dinky, and a bunch of little fish.

“Initially writing was a defense against the crushing isolation and pain I was experiencing when I started doing time at 19. What partly inspired me was a fictionalized biography of Arthur Rimbaud, who ironically stopped writing at 19. I started when I was in the ‘hole’ at Elmira in 1964, when the state allowed prisoners in that situation to write one letter a week. I was given a pencil for one hour on a Sunday to write my letter, and after using the hour in a letter home I’d then scribble rhymey stuff on the back of envelopes. It was self-pitying, syrupy crap… Somewhere along the line I began to develop, often … as a result of reading the masters, like Whitman, Neruda, others.”

Culhane won first prize in poetry for “Of Cold Places” (1987) and second prize for “After Almost Twenty Years” (1986). He also received prizes for drama (1990, 1988) and for fiction (1989), and nonfiction (1988). Published widely, his work has appeared in Prison Writing in 20th Century America, edited by Bruce Franklin, and The Light From Another Country, edited by Joseph Bruchac.

Anthony LaBarca Falcone (b.1961) grew up in Gravesend, Brooklyn, and attended Kingsborough College. “I write for myself,” he says, “to try to understand why I am so sad and lonely, why I can’t seem to get out of my own way, why I chase away anyone who seems to get too close—and because I love words.”

His poem, “A Stranger,” won a PEN honorable mention for poetry in 1996. He was released from prison in 2001.

Born in Puerto Rico, Raymond Ringo Fernandez (b.1949) says, “I grew up in Brooklyn and kind of died in Vietnam 1968-69. I’ve always wanted to write, sing, entertain, but growing up Rican, not to mention being the oldest son, wasn’t exactly conducive to the arts. For many years I was macho just to please my father. I was a bad ass Brooklyn bum with a rep that led me to jail time and time again. Half my life has been spent behind bars.” But most of what he learned, he says, came from taking advantage of his incarceration. “Prison is a hard-edged life, authority is capricious. Thoughts are contraband, and writing is a serious, deadly business, which I love. Never mind all the time in the hole that prison writers get. To me it meant that my voice was a voice to be reckoned with.”

Fernandez won first prize for drama in 1988 for If this is Serious, Why Am I Laughing? based on the exchange of prison “toasts” between Whitey, Indio, and Black. His play Looking for Tomorrow won an award from the New England Theater Festival. He has offered readings and has promoted AIDS awareness in the Save Our Youth program. “PEN takes the cake,” he says, “because it encourages an involvement between the prison, the writer, and the subject, perhaps because the folks at PEN realize that prison life does indeed force involvement and that that involvement is life-saving.”

J. R. Grindlay (1949–1993), of Elizabeth, New Jersey, was educated in Westfield and Scotch Plains. “He was so bright,” his mother, Genevieve Grindlay, recalled, “that teachers let him take over the class in grammar school.” Honorably discharged after serving in Vietnam, he was attending Livingston College of Rutgers when he was convicted of manslaughter.

“Myths of Darkness: The Toledo Madman and the Ultimate Freedom” won first prizes in fiction in 1976 and was published in Confrontation. “In a bleak, unchallenging existence it’s all too easy for the mind and will to atrophy. A man needs to create his own goals and to consciously force himself to work toward them,” he wrote to PEN about the effect of the contest on prisoners. “For many men, writing serves to fill that need, and to provide a means of expression unlike any many of them have ever known.” The contest “gave me a focal point to direct my energies toward. I feel less isolated, more a part of the real world.” Upon release, he completed his B.A. in English. His poem “Steal the Dawn” was published in the Hudson Review in autumn 1977.

The mother of Ajamu C. B. Haki (1969 –2007) died giving birth to him on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. He was raised by his great-grandparents until the age of ten, when he came to the United States. He grew up in Brooklyn. “That’s where my education began,” he wrote, “in school and in noticing the perils of urban lives.” He had started college and was a boxer training for the ‘92 Olympics when he was arrested. “All I had to keep me sane in prison was my typewriter and my mind,” he wrote. “Writing had to become my friend and lover, my guide and adviser.” Edgar Allen Poe’s work inspired him to emulation, until he found his own voice. His “Turned Out on 42nd Street” won first prize in poetry. Haki is an assumed name; his real name is Cecil Boatswain. He was indicted in 2008 for having conspired for seven years to import cocaine from the Caribbean to sell in Baltimore, but, reportedly, he had already been murdered months before on the island of Dominica.

“My life has been marked by great sweeps of changing fortune,” wrote Egyptian Victor Hassine (1955–2008). Following the Suez crisis of 1956, he and his family were exiled for being Jewish. They relocated first as penniless, stateless, refugees in France, then in 1961 in Trenton, New Jersey. A sweep of good fortune saw Hassine earn a B.A. from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and a J.D. from New York School of Law. His American dream ended five months later when he was charged with murder and in 1981 sentenced to life without parole. Feeling as though his vocal cords had been torn out, Hassine said, for a while he “did the prison thing, living in a semi-barbaric world of indifference and primitive survival.”

“My first efforts at self-expression consisted of an almost death-defying activism” which challenged “long standing inmate leadership and practices as well as the might of the prison administration.” Along with other plaintiffs, he filed and won a conditions of confinement lawsuit, which resulted ultimately in $50 million in improvements to Grater-ford. Transferred to Western Penitentiary, which had just undergone a brutal prison riot, he joined another lawsuit, resulting in $75 million in improvements to Western. He also headed the prison’s chapter of the NAACP, founded the first accredited synagogue in a U.S. prison, and co-founded a post-release transition house for newly released prisoners. Hassine received the Pennsylvania Prison Society’s Inmate of the Year Award.

Hassine was “too angry, frightened, insecure, and ashamed” to think of becoming a writer until his first poem—provoked by a young convict’s suicide attempt—won an honorable mention in 1987. Then he interviewed a series of troubled men—mentally ill, living with AIDS, victimized sexually, and too institutionalized to function in the world; out of these prize winning pieces, he developed his Life without Parole: Living in Prison Today (1996). This invaluable work has gone through five editions.

His play “Circles of Nod,” challenging the death penalty, was performed by an all-inmate cast in Rockview Prison within two hundred feet of the death chamber. In 2003, the Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies published his essay, “How Do I Treat My Hungry Lion: A Model for Violence Management in Prison.” Hassine is the major contributor to The Crying Wall and Other Prison Stories published by WilloTrees Press in partnership with Infinity Publishing Company in 2005.

Though still in the midst of writing projects, Victor Hassine committed suicide in April 2008 at the age of fifty-three, shortly after being denied a commutation-of-sentence hearing.

Michael Hogan (b.1943) was raised in New England. He moved to Arizona in his early twenties, where he was later convicted of forgery of state Supreme Court documents and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. In 1975, while in a writing workshop with poet Richard Shelton, Hogan received first prize in poetry for “Spring.” The following year he became the first prisoner to be awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship.In 1977 his sentence was reversed by the courts and he was released.

Hogan writes, “I believe that words are like snakes we sleep with. If we honor them and respect them, they will protect us from the darkness which surrounds us. If we do not, then we are in real danger both as individuals and collectively as a society. As a reader I know that poetry gave me sustenance in the dark night of the soul. As a writer I hope to give some of that vital energy back.”

Hogan’s publications include a history of the Irish Battalion in Mexico and Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millenium, as well as several books of poetry. He taught for years at the American School Foundation of Guadalajara, where he founded Sin Fronteras, a prize-winning tri-lingual student literary magazine. He continues to write poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Michael Wayne Hunter (b.1958), raised in Sunnyvale, California, joined the Navy and spent four years operating computer systems on a carrier-based S-3A jet aircraft. Honorably discharged, he worked as an electronic technician in San Francisco until 1982 when he was arrested for murder. Five days before being sentenced to death, he married a co-worker from the computer company. Writing to his wife every night until they divorced five years later acquainted him with writing, he says.

Then a legal secretary who had been reading his letters to lawyers urged him to write professionally. “So like many misadventures of men, this one started with an attractive woman telling me she thought I could do something. No one was more surprised than I when my first story, ‘Mother Teresa on Death Row,’ was published by Catholic Digest.” When another story was published in Prison Life along with Susan Rosenberg’s “Lee’s Time,” which had won a PEN award, Hunter was “struck by her courage in addressing the virulent racism behind bars.

“Without ‘Lee’s Time,’ there would have been no Sam, so Susan has in a way contributed twice to this anthology,” Hunter says. “The PEN awards allowed me to set aside commercial ventures and try to do my best writing.” Neither guards nor prisoners are a monolithic group, he wrote, but the “group-think” of guards is that they are “knights in shining armor, protecting society from predators,” while the “group-think” of prisoners is that “they’re hostages of a corrupt, racist, and in the worst sense of the word, ‘political’ system. Writing about prison made me re-examine my assumptions, many of which were based upon emotion and did not survive intact once I began to write.” Sam tied for first prize in fction (1995). Hunter took third prize for fiction in 2001. He has also written for a broadsheet called “Big News,” sold in the New York subways by the homeless.

In court, Hunter successfully challenged his sentence, arguing pros-ecutorial misconduct; his death sentence was vacated and he received a sentence of life without parole. He misses his friends on death row but appreciates the opportunity to go to school and work. He has received his G.E.D. and an A.A. from Coastline Community College. He has worked in the law library, the Program Office, and as Lieutenant’s clerk on third watch.

Roger Jaco (1944- 200?) was born in McMinnville, Tennessee, one of nine children, all the boys with names beginning with R. At a young age, they lost both their parents in an automobile accident. The children were scattered; Roger was placed in a home in Kentucky. His sister Gladys, always impressed with his high intelligence and his artistic bent, remained in contact with Roger. After Jaco completed his military service, he joined Gladys in Virginia. He became a highly skilled mechanic. When he was arrested for armed robbery, Gladys bought him a typewriter to encourage him to write.

With that typewriter, Jaco wrote a story that won first prize for fiction in 1979; Jaco wrote: “In a world where I am reminded of only my faults while being expected to give my best, hopes are not easily grasped. Until I began writing, I never met myself … Now that I can see myself more clearly, I have discovered that the world contains other humans, all with feelings, trucking toward visions of something more meaningful.” His poem, “Killing Time,” received an honorable mention in 1980 and was published by Janet Lembke (who taught him writing in prison) in Creative Righters Anthology, 1978–1980. When his writing about prison officials falsifying records led to his manuscripts being confiscated, PEN protested, and the prison backed down, Lembke recalls.

“Through my writings,” Jaco wrote in 1981, “I began to discover how great and ornery I really am.”

Upon release, Jaco did not settle down. His sister attributed his love of roaming to his artistic nature. When Jaco fell ill, early in this century, he returned to his sister’s home to die.

Saxophonist Henry Johnson (1949-1996) of Brooklyn and Harlem, said in 1984 that workshops with Joe Bruchac, Paul Corrigan, and Judith McDaniel stimulated his interest in writing. “I believe that the good in man will ultimately overcome the shadier side,” he wrote. “In the meanwhile, I’ll keep composing lullabies for the sun.” While in prison, Johnson earned a B.A. in Sociology from Skidmore College, a Master’s Degree in Professional Studies in Ministry and Pastoral Counseling, cum laude, from the New York Theological Seminary, and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College. The chaplain’s assistant and a leader in the Alternatives to Violence Program, he also taught literacy and led poetry workshops in Sing Sing.

Johnson won second prize in poetry (1982), an honorable mention in nonfiction (1988), and the Madeline Sadin Award in 1985. His work has been published in the New York Quarterly, two anthologies, Light from Another Country and Candles Burn in Memory Town, and two chapbooks, The Problem and—after release—The Five-Spot Cafe (Castillo Cultural Center, 1990). He worked briefly for the Fortune Society. He died in 1996.

The late poet Janine Pommy Vega, who had taught Johnson in a Sing Sing workshop, recalls his visit to Woodstock in 1990 shortly after his release. “It had begun to snow, he didn’t have proper boots. On the way to the bus-station, we stopped in a second-hand bookstore. He spotted a book by Browning. ‘I love this guy!’ he said, and bought the book. As we walked out in the snow, I had to laugh. ‘Hank! Look at you! You gotta be the only black guy in creation walking thru the snow clutching Browning to his breast.’”

Writing and drugs overlap for M. A. Jones, who wrote: “Addiction facilitated my incarceration; writing helped to free me—I try to explain how I felt (and still feel) a particular sensitivity or openness to emotional pain. Narcotics, for me, served as ‘medicine’ and when they were unavailable, I discovered language. In the James Baldwin story, ‘Sonny’s Blues,’ the older brother of Sonny, a heroin addict and jazz musician, asks him whether he needs dope to play music. Sonny replies ‘It’s not so much to play. It’s to stand it, to be able to make it at all. on any level … In order to keep from shaking to pieces.’ Later, listening to Sonny play with his band in an East Village nightclub, the brother discovers how music affords Sonny a kind of salvation, a means to transcend pain, to transform his personal anguish into art.”

Jones got off drugs, got his master’s degree, and was working toward a doctorate. As an English instructor in a Boston-area university, he wrote, “I teach the Baldwin story to my students, who at first ‘don’t get it.’ Like Sonny’s brother, they resist understanding; if they struggle with the story, however, they learn something about human pain and art and how art—making it, responding to it—affords insight into our own suffering and joy, the things that make us human.”

M. A. Jones (not his real name) won second prize in fiction (1978– 79), first in poetry for “Overture” (1980), and third in poetry for “Prison Letter” (1981). He taught at two Boston-area colleges where his odd sense of humor and unorthodox teaching methods bewildered some of his students and thrilled others. He died suddenly a few years ago.

Robert Kelsey (b.1953) was born in New York, raised in northern California, and educated at the Putney School in Vermont. He worked as a carpenter and had his own sawmill, until a drunk driving accident landed him in a New York prison for second-degree manslaughter.

Paroled to California, he took Amtrak, “a wonderful contemplative experience after seven years locked up.” He completed a B.A. at the University of San Francisco. Only in prison, with the encouragement of a community college teacher, did he take writing seriously, confessing in a class paper, “Writing is the therapist I never leveled with, the woman who never understood me, the father who never paid much attention to me.”

“Suicide” won first prize in fiction in 1994. Kelsey has also published in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, and Massachusetts Review, among others. His “Mother and Child Re-Union” was listed in “Notable Essays of 1993” in Best American Essays 1994.

At bookstores and universities in the Bay Area, Kelsey read from “Suicide” in 2000. He completed his B.A. in English at the University of San Francisco. He had hoped to work as a tech writer, but by then the dot com bubble had burst, so he has worked in construction.

He says that he feels very lucky to have so many things go right for him after prison. In Northern California he met “a wonderful woman who grew up twenty miles from me in New York.” In prison, he says, “I wished I would get the chance to make up for what a lousy son I had been to my mom. She turned eighty the year I got out and here it is fourteen years later and I’m involved with her being able to live in her home, getting her groceries, and taking care of her house.” And, “I finally met the daughter who I only knew about when I was locked up, who now has two sons, aged seven and three. Life goes on. It’s great.”

After the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, the family of Reginald Sinclair Lewis (b.1954) moved from riot-torn Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia. There Lewis joined a gang called Twelfth and Oxford Street, “one of the largest and fiercest in Philly,” writes Lewis. Later he would join the Nation of Islam. A high-school dropout, he got his G.E.D. in Rahway State Prison in New Jersey, where he was the Rahway State welterweight champion. Paroled in 1981, he attended Temple University for one year, then was convicted again in 1983 and sentenced to death.

“Reading has always been my greatest passion,” Lewis writes. He admires James Baldwin, Sidney Sheldon, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. “When I received the death penalty, the pain and humiliation spurred an emotional torrent of words. Writing is my life, my spiritual connection to God. Like all writers, I yearn to write the literary masterpiece that would hurl me into immortality, in the company of the literary legends.”

Admiring the works of Sinclair Lewis, he adopted Sinclair as a middle name.

Lewis has published articles, poems, and stories in the Philadelphia Daily News, North Coast Xpress, the Other Side Magazine, and other journals. He won third prize in non-fiction for “Sweeter than Sugar”(1987) and first prize in poetry for “In the Big Yard” (1988). He has published Where I’m Writing From: Essays from Pennsylvania’s Death Row and two collections of poetry: Leaving Death Row and Inside My Head. A third collection, Psalms of Death Row, is forthcoming.

Lori Lynn McLuckie (b.1961) was born and raised in New Jersey. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She earned a B.A. in Literature in 1984 and moved to Colorado shortly thereafter.

Since 1988, McLuckie has been serving a term of forty years to life for the first-degree murder of her abusive boyfriend. During her incarceration, she has trained many assistance dogs for handicapped people through Colorado Correctional Industries as well as Freedom Service Dogs, Inc. This work is very dear to her.

“Trina Marie” won first prize for poetry in 1992. The real Trina Marie has been living successfully in freedom since 1993, McLuckie says. Writers she admires include Ernest Hemingway, Oliver Sacks, Agatha Christie, Dan Brown, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen, and Bob Dylan. McLuckie continues to pursue her own writing. “It’s all about having a voice,” she says.

Jarvis Jay Masters (b.1962) was born in Torrance, California, and raised in a series of foster homes in southern California. A number of holdups led him to San Quentin in 1981. There he was convicted of conspiracy in the 1985 killing of a corrections officer despite the fact that he was in another part of the prison when the crime was committed. During his death penalty trial he happened on the writings of Tibetan Buddhist lama Chagdud Tilku Rinpoche. “For a long time I was my own stranger,” Masters writes, “but everything I went through in learning how to accept myself brought me to the doorsteps of dharma, the Buddhist path.” In Finding Freedom: A Buddhist on Death Row, he describes Rinpoche’s visits, his own meditation, and his evolution into a “peace activist” among the condemned.

In 2009, Masters’ second book That Bird has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row, was published by HarperOne. He sought to tell his story without blaming others. “In essence, questioning my own sincerity is what inspired this book,” Masters says. “Many times just the memories made me want to quit writing,” he writes. “At times I literally cursed the makeshift pen caught painfully between my fngers. There was no name I did not call it. It was not just that it hurt to hold it, but that it moved so slowly, forcing me to attend to every detail. I couldn’t write any faster than it let me; it refused to skim lightly over the surface as I tried to breeze past the unpronounced emotions that would crawl up my throat and fill my eyes with tears. The filler’s slow pace repeatedly dragged me into a swamp of unwanted memories. Only through the patience learned in meditation was I able to settle myself into a place that allowed me to keep writing.” The book was a finalist for the Creative Nonfiction Award of PEN Center USA, and named a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Selection in 2009. Masters’ poem “Recipe for Prison Pruno” won a PEN Prison Writing prize in 1992.

After being held for twenty-two years in the Adjustment Center of death row, where he could have no contact visits and make no phone calls, Masters was returned in 2007 to the general death row population.

In the same year, the California Supreme Court reviewed Masters’ habeas corpus appeal and issued a broad Order to Show Cause that granted him an evidentiary hearing to look at new evidence that may prove his innocence. The evidentiary hearing concluded in April 2011, and he currently awaits a decision on his freedom from the California Supreme Court.

After Diane Hamill Metzger (b.1949) finished high school near her native Philadelphia, she postponed college, intending to go on in a few years. “But then life blinked,” she says. She married a man who later killed his ex-wife during a custody fight, while Metzger and her infant son were outside in the car. Although she had done no violence, she says she did aid her husband in the cover-up and was a fugitive with him and their baby for over a year before being arrested in Boise, Idaho. For accomplice liability, she received a life sentence. In Pennsylvania, there is no parole for lifers, and, according to Metzger, only 30 out of 3000 lifers have had their sentences commuted in the past twenty yea rs.

Among other awards, Metzger has won citations from Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives and Senate for being the first female to earn, while incarcerated, a baccalaureate degree. She also holds an A.A. in Business Administration, certification as a Paralegal, and a Master’s in Humanities/History. She won honorable mentions in poetry (1978, 1988), third prize in fiction (1981), first in poetry (1985) for “Uncle Adam,” and an honorable mention (2005) for “Panopticon.” First published at age twelve, she has work in Pearl, Anima, and Collages and Brico-lages, as well as her own chapbook, Coralline Ornaments.

To be closer to her family, Metzger received a “hardship” transfer to the women’s prison in Delaware in 1995. She lived in a minimum security unit, in the “honor” pod, and enjoyed her jobs: paralegal in the Law Library, clerk in the Treatment Services Department, and prison photographer. When a new warden arrived late in 2010, Metger began receiving “bogus misconduct charges” and was put in solitary for three months. In June 2011, she was sent back to Pennsylvania and labeled “an escape risk,” though she had been found not guilty of a charge of attempted escape recently in Delaware.

Vera Montgomery (1936–1962) was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, where she died. Beginning in her teens, she spent much of her life in Edna Mahan Correctional Institution for Women in Clinton. “No one could forget Vera,” Lois Morris, former assistant superintendent, says. “She was very bright and had a delightful sense of humor, though from the administrative point of view, she was a management problem. Her philosophy was that rules were made to be broken.” When the Supreme Court mandated that prisons have law libraries, Montgomery became a full-time jailhouse lawyer, helping other women with appeals and representing them in disciplinary hearings.

Montgomery had “absolute integrity and fought like a fiend for what she thought right,” according to her attorney, Raymond A. Brown, who represented her successfully in a case involving escape and assault. Montgomery became director of the Inmate Legal Association. Jennie Brown, then a member of the State Advisory Board of Control, knew Montgomery well. “She developed herself in prison, she became a talented tailor and a leader. Being fearless, Vera was always prepared to help staff with an inmate in crisis.”

“Solidarity with cataracts” won first prize for poetry in 1976. Albert Montgomery remembers his favorite aunt as “a good-hearted person and a loyal friend.” In Clinton prison, she was president of the women lifers’ group.“She was always creative,” her nephew recalls. Near the end of her life, she told him that she wanted to write a book.

Robert J Moriarty (b.1946) was born in Schenectady and raised in the West. A former U.S. Marine fighter pilot, he flew 833 combat missions from July 1968 to March 1970 in Vietnam and was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses and forty-one Air Medals in addition to several citations from South Vietnam, including the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He was also distinguished for being the youngest Navy/Marine pilot in Vietnam, having started flying combat as a twnety-year-old second lieutenant and becoming a captain at the age of twenty-two. Five years after leaving the service, Moriarty became a trans-oceanic ferry pilot and a part-time long-distance racer. His logbooks show twelve thousand hours total time, over 240 trans-oceanic crossings and first place in two New York-to-Paris air races flying his favorite Bonanza V-35. On a lark, he became the first person in history to fly through the arches of the Eiffel tower in March of 1984; Air-Space published his account in October, 1986.

“Pilots in the War on Drugs” took first prize in nonfiction in 1989 and “Against the Prohibition of Drugs” won second prize in 1990. How did he become a writer? “I just sat down and started writing.” He has also published in aviation magazines and currently runs a successful business.

Paul Mulryan (b.1954), born in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and raised in Savannah, Georgia, was arrested in Batavia, Ohio, for aggravated robbery and gun charges in 1983. In prison in Lucasville, he studied printing and industrial electricity and took three years of college courses in liberal arts, focusing on art, writing, and music theory. Later apprenticing in the electric shop at Mansfield Prison, he painted and taught music theory for guitar. Mulryan says he has no favorite writers, though he has always been moved by Sylvia Plath’s poetry.

“Eleven Days Under Siege: An Insider’s Account of the Lucasville Riot,” won first prize for nonfiction in 1995. It was first published in Prison Life, along with one of his paintings. His story, “My Sister’s Letter,” was published in The Right Words at the Right Time, vol. 2., edited by Marlo Thomas.

He was released from prison in 2008.

Patrick Nolan (1963-2000), of “Cabbagetown,” an Irish neighborhood in Toronto, grew up in boys’ homes and on the street, and at age sixteen went to prison for three years. After two years of freedom, he says, “I gave up on life. Instead of ending what I commonly refer to as my wretched existence I took the coward’s way out, taking the life of another.” At Folsom Prison (Sacramento) he spent two years in the hole, reading and writing essays about what he felt.

“The person who changed my life was Victor Frankl—his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. I also fell in love with the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau. When I was finally released from the hole I had only one purpose—to transform my life.” Thanks to the California Arts-in-Corrections program, he took a workshop with a professional poet, Dianna Henning. “In poetry I have found a process to look inward and find meaning to what I considered an otherwise meaningless life.” he wrote. Among influences, he cites Robert Bly, Robert Hayden, Etheridge Knight, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Eventually Nolan facilitated the poetry workshop himself. “If guys can get a taste for what poetry offers,” Nolan wrote, “it will stir the souls of those who secretly long to be heard.”

“Ol’ Man Motown” was written in the aftermath of a race riot, in which Motown was attacked. During the lockdown following the riot, Nolan began to see race hatred as self-hatred projected outward. He persuaded the chaplain to co-facilitate gatherings of men of all races to share their thoughts and feelings as they never could in the yard. The men’s groups that Nolan founded continue to meet in Folsom to this day.

In 2000, hepatitis C forced Nolan’s move to Vacaville Medical Facility. When he was dying, the Folsom prison chaplain was prevented from seeing him. But an extraordinary exception was made at Folsom, and memorial services were held in the two prison yards where Nolan was best known.

Charles P. Norman (b.1949) attributes his storytelling to his grandmother, who told him tales of pioneer life in Texas, where he spent his early years. He studied at the University of South Carolina. After the deterioration of his marriage, he became involved in financial crimes, and later was convicted of a murder that had occurred three years earlier.

Serving a life sentence in Florida prisons, Norman won a MENSA scholarship that allowed him to continue his college education. He also studied business, computers, printing, graphic arts, horticulture, and law, all of which skills he put to use. He taught classes in computers, writing, English for Speakers of Other Languages, and G.E.D. Prep, and he worked in a prisoner self-help program and a boot camp for young first-time offenders.

“Pearl Got Stabbed” won an honorable mention in the prison writing contest in 1992. The Actors Studio in New York performed Norman’s “Tattoo Blues,” winning first prize in drama from Prison Life. Norman won many prizes in fiction, essay, memoir, poetry, and drama over the years, culminating in 2009 with the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Prison Writing Program. Most recently, his memoir, “Fighting The Ninja,” about AIDS in prison, won first prize in the PEN contest and was published in the Journal of Prisoners on Prison, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2010.

Although confined for thirty-three years, Norman has embraced the Internet age and is featured on a web site, www.freecharlienow.com. Two of his essays were published on www.thecrimereport.org. As a contributor to the Anne Frank Center USA Prison Diary Project, Norman was interviewed by the Associated Press. Scores of his essays have been posted on a blog, http://charlienorman.blogspot.com.

In 2010 Norman spent thirty days in solitary confinement after his memoir, “To Protect The Guilty,” about Ku Klux Klan prison guards, was published in an anthology. When he brought a lawsuit over this retaliation, he was punitively transferred to a unit far from his friends. He is currently fighting for his freedom in Florida courts and working on a memoir, “Chain Gang Mating Rituals,” a short story collection, and a novel.

When Judee Norton was born in 1949 in an Arizona farm town, her father was a twenty-two-year-old farm boy, one of ten children, and her mother was one of thirteen children of itinerant fruit-and-cotton pickers, “a fifteen-year-old beauty with the look of gypsies about her,” as Norton writes. Norton and her four siblings battled a legacy of “addiction, poverty, low self-esteem, and a general sense of bewilderment about the business of living.” But “when l read, I was somewhere else. I was no longer the oldest child in the most dysfunctional family in the universe. Writing was magic and I wanted to be a magician, to take people out of what was awful to another place.”

Her own battles led her to Arizona State Prison, Perryville, to confront her demons. Instead of a demon, she writes, she found “a little girl cowering under the covers waiting for next blow to fall. All I had to fgure out was how to get her out of prison in one piece and I did that by writing.”

She has won two first prizes in fiction, for “Summer, 1964” (1988) and for “Norton 59900” (1991). The two pieces are part of a larger work, Slick, “fctional reflections on how and why I made bad choices.”

Norton has read her work and discussed the experience of women in prison in bookstores and universities in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Michigan, and New York.

Now living outside Snowflake, Arizona, a small farming community, she has almost gotten off the grid using solar energy, well water, and a wood stove. At Northland Pioneer College, she is earning a degree in nursing. She intends to join the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders. She grows and cans her own food and spends her spare time reading, gardening, writing, and running with her dogs and her horse. I live the way I do,” she says, “because even after all these years, the stigma of being an ex-felon, and a female ex-felon, to boot—still follows me like a noxious cloud.” An ex-felon cannot work on the census or get food stamps, government assisted housing, or school grants. “Life is good, but because I make it so, in spite of being an ex-con.”

The real name of William Orlando (1953-1999) was Orlando Askew. A war baby, black and Korean, he was adopted but ran away from a strict home in Los Angeles. “I had a criminal record before a mustache,” he wrote. “At seventeen, I strolled into the army. Saw Germany and next met heroin in Vietnam. Came back a dope-shootin’ bank-robbin’ fool. I’ve spent the shank of my life in prison. Those are the bare bones. The rest is apologia.”

“Dog Star Desperado,” an excerpt from a novel, tied for second prize in fiction in 1997. Part of his second novel, Chino, was published in the North American Review in November/December 1997. “As a square peg kind of kid, I read for transport”—works like Beowulf and novels by London, Stevenson, and Twain—”until I learned to smoke and drink and cuss and fight and swagger in leather to a raucous dice game, and street life claimed me from the books.” In prison, he earned a B.A. in sociology, studied Spanish and German, and read omnivorously, finding “gems among the rhinestones” in prison libraries. “Reading made the writer. That, and the crucible of experience. Writing is all I have, a lament and a boast.”

After serving eighteen years, he was released in 1999, with no contacts and no preparation for re-entry. From a half-way house he wrote, “I’m feeling beset—naturally, starting from scratch… . I plan to make myself free and to stay free. I’ll always take my chances—but I’m more a writer than an outlaw.” Within a few weeks, he was dead.

Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez (b.1962) was raised first in the Bronx, New York, then in East Los Angeles and Pomona, California. He is serving eighteen years to life for murder. While incarcerated he received a B.A. from Syracuse University and a Master’s degree in professional studies from New York Theological Seminary. “I daydream a lot so I guess I’ve always written poetry in my head,” he wrote. “Daydreams are hard to explain to people, sometimes hard to explain to myself. Writing them out is sort of like giving daydreams a life longer than a fleeting thought. Yet writing is a double-edged sword for me. I love to write, but I hate the rules of grammar—too restricting. That’s why poetry likes me. She encourages me to take liberties and sometimes they even turn out to be a poem, but most of the time, poem or no poem, writing is my way of sledge hammering these walls.

“Parole Board Blues” tied for first prize in poetry in 2002; his essay, “Paralegal Training for the Formerly Incarcerated” won an honorable mention for essay in 2007. “Sing Sing Sits up the River” was published in The American Bible of Outlaw Poetry. He is the Administrative Law Library Clerk and Inmate Coordinator for the Alternative to Violence Project at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, and with others created the Reality Awareness Work Project, a pre-reentry program of the Lifers and Long-termers Organization, which publishes The Raw Truth.

When he was sixteen, Daniel Roseboom (b.1972) put his rural hometown near Cooperstown, New York, behind him to travel alone. After several arrests for petty crimes (“non-violent and non-drug-related— freedom was my high”), he was sent to a shock incarceration camp at seventeen. Escaping, he fled west, until caught in Missouri and extradited to New York. Months in solitary and keep-lock confinement to his cell as a consequence of his attempted escape introduced him to books and to writing. While in Auburn, he took Syracuse University courses. Compared to the “intense atmosphere” of those classes, his courses in the world seem “a shame.” Since his release, he has become a self-employed building contractor.

His first experiment in writing, “The Night The Owl Interrupted,” based on a real experience, won third prize for fiction in 1993.

An activist in the student anti-war and women’s movements in the 1970s, New Yorker Susan Rosenberg (b.1955) studied at City College of New York and Montreal Institute of Chinese Medicine, becoming a doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. Targeted by the FBI for her support of the Black Liberation Army, she went underground in the 1980s. In 1984, she was convicted of possession of weapons and explosives and sentenced to fifty-eight years.

Spending almost eleven years in isolation and semi-isolation, she says, “I write in order to live in the most creative, productive, and challenging way I have available to me. Prison life is life stripped to the bone, and all the good and bad is held up in the sharpest light. I watch and listen and struggle with what I see in order to write about it. This forces me to remain conscious of the suffering around me and to resist getting numb to it. I write to keep my heart open, to keep pumping fresh red blood.”

Winner of first prizes in poetry (1991), short story (1992), and memoir (1994), as well as getting two honorable mentions, Rosenberg’s work has been published in many anthologies. She has written about women casualties of the drug war, and earned an M.A. in creative writing from the McGregor School of Antioch University.

After sixteen years in prison Rosenberg was pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office in 2001. Upon her release, moving to New York City, she became an active member of the PEN Prison Writing Committee. She has worked as an adjunct professor teaching Prison Literature and American Literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has served as director of communications at American Jewish World Service since 2003. She lives with her partner and her daughter. “We who swim to the other side of the river have to write about it,” she said, and after a decade of work, she published her memoir, An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country, from which she is reading at events across the country.

As a child, Anthony Ross (b.1959) wrote “butchered versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel,” but his ambition was to be a cartoonist. Ross says that he dropped out of school mentally in fourth grade, physically in seventh. At twelve his life became entangled with the gangs of his native Los Angeles and “whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.” He was inspired by Stanley “Tookie” Williams, founder of the L.A. Crips, and at fourteen, Ross and others founded the Raymond Avenue branch of the Crips. In 1981, at the age of twenty-two he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.

Years later, finding himself the oldest among his gang locked up at San Quentin, he decided he had to provide leadership.“I made some decisions about what I would do and what I would not do,” he said, and he held to his resolve. Ross and his co-defendant, Steve Champion, decided to turn their lives around, to study. Passing books and manuscripts back and forth, each became the other’s mentor.

“Walker’s Requiem” tied for first prize in fiction (1995). As a child Ross was taken on a school trip to Griffith Park, where he could look down from the heights to the depths of South Central Los Angeles, the ghetto where he lived. As they returned home, he thought about the contrast between the park’s beauty and the grime and violence of South Central. “The keys to the observatory” came to him to be a metaphor for access to the world of knowledge and beauty from which people in South Central seemed locked out. When Ross received the PEN award, “Walker’s Requiem,” he said that it was like “being given the keys to the observatory.”

Ross is now working on a manuscript with Steve Champion. And he plans to marry a woman in Germany’s Green Party, who is a member of Parliament in Frankfurt.

Robert M. Rutan (b.1944) attended Catholic schools in his native Philadelphia. In prison from the age of twenty-four on, he garnered another sentence for manslaughter and was not released until he was forty-three. He took courses at the University of Iowa, dreaming of its famous Writers’ Workshop.The dream was deferred by conviction for unarmed robbery and escape.

In 1978, “The Break” won first prize in fiction; it was published in Time Capsule. “Partners” won third prize in fiction in 1982. Then Rutan turned to writing poetry. “Love of language and literature drove my desire to write. I admire the nineteenth-century novel in the hands of Eliot and Hardy, and I like the poetry that came out of Spain during the thirties. But my real passion is Shakespeare.” As to why he writes, “The way out is the way in,” he says. “Writing provides the release that comes with disclosure.”

Robert Rutan was released in May 2010.

Of Irish and Lithuanian stock, Jackie Ruzas (b.1943) grew up in Queens. At parochial school, he wrote, “I achieved both an education and bruises from the Grey Nuns.” Turning sixteen at Aviation Trades High School, he was invited to quit or be expelled. He joined the ranks of construction workers. “When the sixties brought protest, alienation, and drugs, I joined those ranks as well. It all led to a final curtain on a sunny autumn day in October 1974, when a confrontation between a state trooper and myself resulted in his tragic death.”

Though charged with a capital crime, a jury spared him a death sentence; he is serving “an exile of thirty-seven years to life.” He earned a G.E.D., but says he is mostly self-taught, “with a thirty-six-year addiction to the New York Times.”

“I realized many years ago that writing provided me with a sense of flight to anywhere I chose to travel. I could leave my cell without sirens in my ears and dogs at my heels. Over years I have tutored in classrooms in every maximum security prison in this state, and nothing gives me greater satisfaction than being part of an inmate’s journey from illiterate to literate.”

“The Day They Lost Their Keeper” won first prize in fiction (1982), and “Ryan’s Ruse” an honorable mention (1994). In 1995 Ruzas took an honorable mention in poetry. His poems have appeared in Candles Burn in Memory Town and Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America. His story, “Reentry According to Bond,” appeared in The Hard Journey Home: Real-Life Stories about Reentering Society after Incarceration.

While incarcerated, Ruzas married his childhood girlfriend, with whome he now has three children fathered from prison. He is about to meet his ninth parole board. He is active in championing parole restitution.

Paul St. John (b.1956) grew up in Long Island and holds an M.A. in sociology. “I went down in the war on drugs,” he says, “but decided that my life wasn’t over. I started writing fiction as a means of experiencing what I could not otherwise.” He won third prizes for fiction in 1992 for “Peeks by Gnome of the Slums on the Bad Hardened to the Absolute” and in 1994 for “Behind the Mirror’s Face.” He has received other honorable mentions in PEN contests. He has published fiction in Midnight Zoo and wrote a few novels. He plays jazz piano and trumpet and writes music as well.

St. John was released in 1999.

The son of a card player, Michael E. Saucier (b.1948) hails from a small Cajun town in Louisiana. He graduated from Mamou High in 1966, hitchhiked to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco with his guitar, and protested the war instead of going to Vietnam. “I drifted across the USA and Mexico living a vagabond’s life until I finally and mercifully got busted for drug-dealing in 1990.” His prison job as a literacy tutor gave him access to a decent library and a grammar book that he devoured, testing himself until he could write clearly. With time and money enough for writing supplies, “I had no more excuses. I told myself that if I wasn’t willing and enthusiastic about writing a novel than I had to shut up and never talk about writing again. That scared the hell out of me.” He wrote his first novel twelve times, then another, Saga of an American Hippie, and a screenplay.

Saucier won an honorable mention in drama for Thinking Twice (1991), third prize in poetry for “Cut Partner” (1992), and first prize in poetry for “Black Flag to the Rescue.”

Later unhoused first by Hurricane Katrina and then by Hurricane Rita, Saucier lived briefly in a trailer provided by FEMA. He now lives in his deceased father’s house just outside Lake Charles’ city limits with a woman he first knew in the movement against the Vietnam war. In 2008, the Southwest Louisiana Historical Association awarded the prize for historical writing to Saucier for his narrative poem, “My Sweet Secret.” He is writing about his great-great cousin, the Confederate soldier who lived to be 105 years old. He continues to write songs, mostly with Acadiana themes, and performs them with his guitar.

“A child of the oil fields,” Barbara Saunders was born (b.1944) in Lub-bock, Texas. Her father was an independent driller. The family followed the “boomtowns” of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Louisiana. At five years of age, Saunders began writing to entertain herself. She became a U.S. Navy nurse. In the late sixties, she earned master’s degrees in art education and in counseling psychology.

“I write because I have to,” she says. “I sculpt my life through writing.” She cites her poem, “The Poet’s Plight”: “words slide behind my eyelids / go crashing through my brain / crying ancient sorrows / speaking ancient pain.”

“The Red Dress” won second prize for poetry in 1996; “Wolf won second prize for poetry in 1998. Her work was published in Rattle.

Saunders was released in 2000. Her essay, “Transition,” about her experience of re-entry, was published in Feminist Studies in 2004. Now she works with Stand in the Gap, an interdenominational ministry, mentoring women in prison. Oklahoma incarcerates women at a higher rate than any other state in the union. Twice a week, she teaches in a Women in Transition program she created in the Tulsa County Jail.

Oklahoma native Jon Schillaci (b.1971) was raised in Dallas, Texas. “When I was four years old, my parents gave me an enormous Underwood manual typewriter—the thing weighed as much as I did—and I promptly wrote my first story.” He says he does not recall ever wanting to be anything but a writer.

“The writers who matter the most to me are the ones who stretched my view of what was possible in the art”—Dylan Thomas for poetry, James Joyce for the novel. “Writing is a way to capture an experience— not merely a thought or story but an entire experience with thoughts, emotions, values all wrapped together—and present it in a way technically designed to make it happen again. If you read my writing, and feel something like what I felt, then I have succeeded.”

Schillaci has an M.A. in humanities from the University of Houston at Clear Lake and is working toward a second master’s degree in literature. He is a member of the National Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. His poem, “The Danger in Crowds,” won an honorable mention in 1998 and “Americans” took a poetry prize in 1999. His poems have been published in Rattle, RE:AL, and Heliotrope.

Joseph E. Sissler (b.1949) was born in Washington D.C., attended the naval prep school Admiral Farragut Academy, enlisted in the navy, received a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland, and served forty-eight months at FCI Morgantown for “the all American charge of conspiring to possess.” There his appeal was opposed, he is pleased to report, by the then Solicitor General Kenneth Starr. From Morgantown, “a thick sandwich of boredom and despair,” he writes, “I was shipped to a Virginia county jail—my halfway house—and soon farmed out to the local stockyard for employment.” Free of the system, he acquired some cattle of his own for his Gobbler Hollow Farm. He returns to the stockyard for hay “in exchange for running with the bulls on sale days.”

“I See Your Work” tied for third prize in fiction in 1995. “I read a great deal and writing seems to be a responsibility flowing from it. I suppose that writing is a way to get things right even if I never quite seem to grasp that goal,” he says. His favorite writer, the one that seemed to most persistently pursue and pin down America’s nightmare shadow, is Robert Stone.” Sissler has published in Harper’s and Rolling Stone (a defense of Hugh Hefner).

In 1999 Sissler read from his story in bookstores in Washington D.C. and New York, where the advice of the poet Marie Ponsot inspired him. (“I was a single mother raising seven children, and if I found fifteen minutes a day to write, so can you.”) Trying his hand at poetry, he won Antietam Review’s poetry contest with his first effort, To Sit Done. Later Charlottesville’s Streetlight published his poem “Mule Zen.”

Sissler sees the stockyard “as an illustration of Pynchon’s entropy. Yet with the fallen arches and teeth, the limps, broken pens, bad checks, it continues to roll on, now draped with peacocks and flowery roosters, guinea fowl din, along the loading dock. Look in some of the pens and besides the strange goats you might see a zebra foal, or a cross between a zebra and donkey known as a zeedonk. Couldn’t make this up.”

Richard Stratton (b.1946) grew up in Wellesley and was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1970. Convicted of conspiracy to import marijuana and hashish in 1982, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. While incarcerated, he wrote a novel Smack Goddess (1990) and “A Skyline Turkey,” which won first prize for fiction (1989). He also became a jailhouse lawyer, wrote his own appeal, and had his sentence vacated. Released in 1990, he read at the PEN Awards ceremony in 1991, where he met Kim Wozencraft, ex-convict author of Rush; they married and for two years collaborated in producing Prison Life.

Earlier Stratton had edited Fortune News, the journal of the Fortune Society. His writing has appeared in journals like Rolling Stone, High Times, Spin, Penthouse, and Newsweek. He is co-author and producer of the dramatic film, Slam, which won the 1998 Sundance Grand Jury award and the Cannes film festival’s Camera d’Or. He has several other film and TV credits. Whiteboyz, which Stratton also co-wrote and produced for Fox Searchlight, was released in 1999. He recently completed an adaptation of Edward Bunker’s novel, Dog Eat Dog, which he is directing.

Stratton’s documentary film credits include Prisoners of the War on Drugs, The Execution Machine: Texas Death Row, Thug Life in D.C, which won an Emmy in 1999, and Gladiator Days: Anatomy of a Prison Murder, all produced for the America Undercover series on HBO. Crude premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and has won numerous awards around the world including the Peace Prize at the Berlin Film festival in 2010. O.G:Joe Stassi, Original Gangster, is currently in production. Godfather and Son: The Legacy of John Gotti Junior is in development.

Stratton also served as technical consultant on the first season of HBO’s dramatic prison TV series, Oz. He was the creator and executive producer of the dramatic TV series Street Time, which aired on Showtime; he wrote and directed The Whole Truth, the season two finale of Street Time. Nation Books published his latest book, Altered States of America, in October 2005. He lives in New York City with his second wife, Antoinette, and son Ivan. An activist in criminal justice reform, he testifies as an expert witness on prison culture and violence in state and federal court.

As the son of a Navy man, David Taber (b.1950) moved from his native Philadelphia to Hawaii, Tennessee, Morocco, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maine. With a B.A. in Classical Languages and German from the University of Colorado, he later studied for two years at the University of Tuebingen, and earned an M.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He most admires German Expressionist poetry; his models for poetry are Silvia Plath and George Trakl.

Taber’s “Diner at Midnight” won first prize in poetry in 1997. His “Abraham’s Son” took first prize in nonfiction in 2000; “The Recital” took first prize in drama in 2002. He has published three poems in Inner Voices and an abridged version of a collection of poems, Luna Moth. He has organized poetry recitals at MCI Norfolk; Derek Walcott, Robert Pinsky, and Rosanna Warren are among those who have performed. He has completed a book of poetry, Stone Circles in the Sand, and is looking for a publisher.

Jon Marc Taylor (b.1961) was born in Topeka, Kansas, finished high school in Indianapolis in 1979, and in 1980 was incarcerated in Indiana. After more than thirteen years, his sentence was reduced to time served; the original sentencing judge remarked that this was “the most remarkable case of self-rehabilitation” that he had ever seen. Taylor was remanded to Missouri to commence another sentence. He received the American Red Cross Certificate of Merit for administering CPR to a heart attack victim. He has worked as a literacy tutor, First Aid and CPR instructor, and narrator and director at the Missouri State Prison’s Center for Braille and Narration Production.

In 1989 Taylor became a crusading journalist on behalf of what he believes to be the best hope for successful rehabilitation to occur in America’s prisons: post-secondary education. His essay, “Pell Grants for Prisoners,” won the Nation/I. F. Stone and Robert F Kennedy Student Journalism Awards in 1993. With the loss of Pell Grants, his endeavors have centered on efforts with Missouri legislators to create prisoner-generated alternative funding to reinstate post-secondary programs in the state’s prisons. He serves as the inside coordinator of the Education from the Inside Out Coalition (www.collegeandcommunity.org), a nonpartisan collaborative of criminal justice and education advocates, campaigning to restore prisoners’ Pell Grant eligibility. He has published three editions of the Prisoner’s Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the U.S. and Canada.

Taylor has won a second prize and three honorable mentions for fiction and nonfiction from PEN. His extensive research in corrections and educational policy has appeared in journals like Criminal Justice, Educational Policy, and Federal Probation. His editorial voice has been featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Indianapolis Star, and the New York Times, among others; the Times piece was read into the Congressional Record during the debates on Pell Grants for prisoners. More recently he has published in the Journal of Corrective Education and the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, among others.

He has earned four college certificates and degrees and a doctorate in public administration from Kennedy-Western University. He is currently enrolled in a master’s of science degree program in criminal justice through Southwest University.

The resolutions committee of his prison’s NAACP branch, of which Taylor is chair, has collectively written one-third of the NAACP’ criminal justice platform.

Eric (“Easy”) Waters (b.1960) of Brooklyn, New York, was convicted of felony murder in 1976 as a non-killing accomplice. While imprisoned, he earned an M.A. in theology from New York Theological Seminary, after earning two B.A.s in sociology and in history/English. “I started writing,” he says, “because I learned that if one doesn’t tell his or her story, others will. I agree with Isak Dinesen that ‘all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.’”

Waters has won six PEN awards as well as four Honorable Mentions in poetry, drama, and nonfiction. In his prize-winning 1997 poem, “My Hero was a Street-Corner Philosopher,” he describes learning to raise questions about history from a old-timers in the ghetto. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and Newsday, The Defender, The Other Side, and AIM, and in several poetry anthologies.

After his release on Election Day 2000, Waters became a member of the PEN Prison Writing Committee. He has worked in child welfare and for the last eight years at the Osborne Association, a non-profit organization working with people impacted by the criminal justice system, i.e., people arrested, people in prisons and jails, and their families. He is also involved in advocacy around criminal justice issues, including parole. He edits the Deuce Club, the newsletter of the Coalition for Parole Reform.

Jessie L. Wise Jr. (1954–1999) of St. Louis, Missouri, was raised mostly by his grandmother; after her death, he went to a boys’ home and then to prison. Finally he was sent to death row at Potosi Correctional Center. He earned a general education degree and taught himself to read and write music: “I just gathered all the books I could, made drumsticks out of pencils and fretboards and keyboards out of cardboard and went to work.” He went on to teach music fundamentals and instrumentation and to lead a prison band mordantly called “The Final Appeal.”

In “No Brownstones, Just Alleyways & Corner Pockets Full” (second prize for poetry in 1994), Wise experimented with narrative that is “not rap or standard verse.” Admiring works by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Stephen King, he became a writer in prison “through pure self-determination.” He sold a teleplay for the sitcom TheJeffersons to CBS in 1984. “I want to write my books so bad,” Wise wrote. “When they come to get me, I just want to tell them that I’m not through with this life, that I have so much to say, and ask them if they can wait awhile. Crazy, isn’t it?”

Despite a strong legal effort to gain clemency and a letter-writing campaign to which PEN members contributed, Wise was executed in 1999.

Born in Manassas, Virginia, David Wood (b. 1957) was raised in Pennsylvania and in Florida, and earned a bachelor’s degree. Although he began writing at twelve and had published fiction and poetry before doing time, he has now published fifteen more stories and one hundred poems. “Although I’m sure that after ten years I am institutionalized to some degree,” he wrote, “writing has been most responsible for helping me keep what lucidity, reasoning, and sanity I still have.” In prison, he became a Buddhist.

“Feathers on the Solar Wind” won first prize for fiction in 1997; Listen to the River won first prize for drama in 1994. Wood has won several other prizes and honorable mentions in fiction, drama, nonfiction, and poetry. He has published in the Jacksonville, Florida, Times-Union, Sun Dog, State Street Review, and Black Ice. “Whenever I get published outside these walls,” he wrote, “it is as though a piece of me gets out.”

After his release in 2003, Wood received the Prison Writing Program’s Dawson Special Citation for a Body of Work.

Born in Chicago, raised in Miami, Dax Xenos (b.1949) took a degree at the University of Texas. After traveling in Europe, he settled in Los Angeles where he began writing and painting. He painted a 60’ x 12’ mural on Westwood Boulevard and, for twelve duck dinners, a Chinese restaurant. He toured California in a converted bread truck taking notes for stories in a journal. He worked as a lifeguard, carpenter, painter, model, contractor, magazine editor, and fisherman and he drove a taxi in Watts after the riots.

Arrested for possession of cocaine in Texas in 1981, he spent thirty-four months in maximum security, He resurrected the award-winning prison newspaper, The Echo, wrote several screenplays (unproduced), a novel, Twist of Faith (published) and many stories, including “Death of a Duke” which tied for first prize in fiction (1984). “Duke” was later published in Witness and in the 1989 O. Henry Awards volume. Xenos is happily married and is writing, painting, and producing videos. Widely published (using pseudonyms), he has won many awards for his work. He values his family life above all else.