Memoir
“While I struggle, I will continue to study and learn about the struggles of others.” After spending almost thirty-three years in a Mississippi prison, on a hot summer day in 2020, I was contacted and invited to be a host of a radical study group. What intrigued me about this program was that it was facilitated »
Memoir
What societal interest is served by keeping prisoners illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? Much has been written and much has been said about life in prison. Some write of the glaring incidents of violence that occur, certain that such subjects will grab the attention of the reader. Others play down the violence, »
Memoir
The injustices keep worsening. How can prisoners report the abuse when they have no voice? When will the hate stop? When will justice be served? Injustices at the prisons in Texas are perpetual. Correctional officers go to work bullying, assaulting, harassing, discriminating, raping, belittling, taunting, judging, and retaliating against prisoners! Treating prisoners inhumanely and subjecting »
Memoir
“I’m surrounded by many brilliant minds, any one of them fully capable of doing what I’ve done and more if given the opportunity.” The presentation at the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration (MUMI) conference in December capped a very productive 2019, which, judging by the current state of our society, can only be considered exceptional. »
Memoir
I use art to examine not only the depths of my own mind but all that surrounds me. Locked in Dark Calm symbolizes the experience of having to process anger inside of a controlled and contained environment. It also represents a turning point in my life. To be able to move forward, it is necessary »
Essay
This special issue, the Abolitionist South, coalesced during the Black Spring protests and the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others, precincts and cop cars burned, and calls to defund and abolish the police reverberated through the streets. In response to overcrowded prisons and »
Memoir
For the last couple years of her life, until she died at the age of ninety-six, my grandmother Lala saw and heard ghosts. (You may have a Nana or a Meemaw; my brother and cousins and I had a Lala.) Many of those who’ve spent time with people nearing death are familiar with this phenomenon. »
Memoir
Last December, as I was wrapping up a visit to my family in eastern North Carolina (the last such visit I’d be able to make, it turned out, for quite a while), my mom gave me a brown spiral-bound handbook: Presbyterian Pot Pourri, a cookbook published in 1984 by the women of the First Presbyterian »
Memoir
I. I have carried a photograph on my person for the past year now. Like my debit card, lip balm, or driver’s license, this photograph has become part of my daily essentials kit. In the black-and-white image, two women clad in patterned and madras print dresses and low kitten heels sit on a rock and »
Essay
The clay knows the hand.The land knows the feet.The souls know the land. Salt water flows in my veins, and I can recall my first taste of the Atlantic Ocean at two years old. I grew up hearing stories of how a six-year-old boy and girl, my maternal grandparents, met on a sandy South Carolina »
Memoir
“’Lisa, Keep on being a rock star!’ my friend Emily wrote. ‘You’ve proven to the universe that you are not to be messed with. Now you can do anything you want.’ Anything—except, apparently, remember.” The earliest thing I remember after the hemorrhage is a moment that I can’t place in time and that may not »
Film
“I have skin in the game. I live here. Appalachians hold me accountable at the grocery store, and that makes the work, and me, more honest.” The week of March 13, 2017, was like any other week for me. I was hustling to get access to a tense courtroom for my feature documentary Recovery Boys »