I Work as a Lead Man

Paul Wach was awarded an Honorable Mention in Nonfiction Essay in the 2022 Prison Writing Contest. Every year, hundreds of imprisoned people from around the country submit poetry, fiction, nonfiction,… More

From the Sidelines

Reginald Stephens was awarded an Honorable Mention in Nonfiction Essay in the 2022 Prison Writing Contest. Every year, hundreds of imprisoned people from around the country submit poetry, fiction, nonfiction,… More

Y’all Aint Here To Be Rehabilitated

Lyle May was awarded 3rd Place in Nonfiction Essay in the 2022 Prison Writing Contest. Every year, hundreds of imprisoned people from around the country submit poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and… More

Ojibwe moccasins in the Wisconsin Historical Museum

Zhigwaajige’

“My mother then explained that the government had run a mass campaign and sterilized Indian people, and that one of the ways to do this was to label anyone… More

hand holding a pen and writing into a notebook

Why I Write

“I write because I have always written, because I want to write, because I don't want to write, because I don't know how to not write. Because, in the… More

From a bird’s eye view, an African American man holds onto the edge of a rocky cliff

Injuries Incompatible with Life

“This is my number, bro. Go to a meeting, get clean, and call me up sometime soon. I need a third baseman for our softball team, and you look… More

prison bars and shadow

Tarkovsky by Countlight

“While in such a state, I had often pictured myself as some performance artist at the Guggenheim or somewhere: bleak, three-walled void of cell, its lotused, blanket-swaddled habitant.” More

cracked window

Raw, Real, Uncensored

“The greatest consolation is that at the instant of death, all that was life ceases to matter; however good or bad, all the events of that life suddenly become… More

Empty prison cells

Little Gardens

“The older I get the more constricting I find the hetero mask to be. Committing this to paper is, then, something of a coming-out party.” More