Turning Sentences Around

In this Works of Justice exclusive, Robert Lee Williams reflects on how PEN America's "The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer's Life in Prison" (Haymarket Books, 2022) helped… 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

M. Kiguwa headshot

The Path to Remembering

“I realized I wanted to write for women like me, women who want to read stories about dark, black ingenues; women who want to remember how ancient and divine… More