Joe Ricky Knight

I am a poet and prisoner serving a term at the Kentucky State Penitentiary. I am the winner of three PEN Prison Writing Awards. I was awarded Second Place in Poetry in 2009 and 2005 and was the recipient of the Fielding Dawson New Voices Award for Poetry in 2004. My poems have appeared in Limestone, Gadfly, and The Iowa Review.

I hope to be paroled in October 2011 and want to attend a creative writing program if I get a scholarship.

Articles by Joe Ricky Knight

Prison and Justice Writing

Monday June 29

Poinsett County

—for Uncle Dale Orange-red gravel roads crisscrossed fields where the flat farmland yielded bales of cotton and tons of soy beans. We planted, chopped, and picked cotton from spring into summer through autumn for fifty cents an hour, and on July 4th, watched turtle races down Main Street. We caught pollywogs, crawfish, and bull frogs

Prison and Justice Writing

Tuesday June 24

An Escape Artist

At eight, I was a magician able to slip from any confinement. After my stepfather beat me and imprisoned me in my bedroom, I decided to disappear, sneaking into the passageway between the left brain and the right, dropping through a trap door and sliding down a chute to the bottom of the cortex where

Prison and Justice Writing

Thursday July 28

Observations From a Penitentiary Window

Darkness melts, then seeps out of the blue-gray sky, while warm beams of light pour like a heavy rain, a bright waterfall running down the leaf-green hills filling the river basin. And I’m standing here on the fourth floor of this fortress watching the big-mouth bass dance head over tail on the dark green waters.