Leo Cardez

Leo Cardez is an award-winning essayist and playwright. He is the two-time winner of the PEN America Prison Writing Contest and Pushcart Prize-nominated. Cardez is a regular contributor to Prison Health News, where he also serves on the Advisory Board. Cardez has been published by Beat Within Magazine, Yard Out, The Abolitionist/Critical Resistance, Poete Maudit Newsletter, and was a finalist for the New Press Anthology What We Know. He can be reached at [email protected]. (inmate last and least of all.)

Winner, 2022 PEN America Prison Writing Contest – 2nd Place in Nonfiction Essay for “Convict Chronicles: Cooking


Articles by Leo Cardez

Thursday March 16

Unsealed: The Blood and Ink of the Prison Pen

Leo Cardez reflects on the limited resources available to incarcerated writers by explaining what it’s like to use a “prison pen.”

Wednesday September 7

Convict Chronicles: Cooking

Leo Cardez was awarded 2nd Place in Nonfiction Memoir in the 2022 Prison Writing Contest. Every year, hundreds of imprisoned people from around the country submit poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works to PEN America’s Prison Writing Contest, one of the few outlets of free expression for the country’s incarcerated population. They are only made