Letters to the Universe

I was pissed when Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his best-selling novel, The Nickel Boys. I remember listening to his interview on NPR’s Fresh Air while quarantined in a prison on the Florida Panhandle during the height of Covid, feeling the way an overzealous sports dad must feel when someone else’s kid wins the MVP. His critically acclaimed novel—and second Pulitzer—was set against the backdrop of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a subject I explored four years earlier in a book I consider to be my life’s work, On the Shoulders of Giants.

There was something intrusive about this darling of the New York literati writing about incarcerated youth in Florida. Like a rival gang member who wandered onto the wrong side of the yard (or a Walmart going up across the street from a local independent grocer). The thing that really grinded my gears was that Dude never even bothered to come down here to tour the cottages or the unmarked graves or the infamous White House.

Of course, I was being irrational, not to mention hypocritical and territorial. Fiction writing, the best of it, turns on imagination and empathy and research. Did it matter that he wasn’t from the Sunshine State? Or that he had never spent time in a facility like Dozier? Hadn’t I written essays slamming cancel culture for attempted takedowns of other authors for similar transgressions? Half of my beloved Giants is written in the point of view of Pharaoh Sinclair, a young black man from the Azalea Arms housing project. To my knowledge, Colson Whitehead has never written an op-ed accusing me of cultural appropriation.

I didn’t care about any of that at the time. I just wanted some love for my book. And aside from my state-raised brothers and sisters and a handful of Facebook friends, my Pillars of the Earth, my Led Zeppelin IV, my David was toiling away in obscurity, unnoticed and unread. I think I even sent Terry Gross a copy at WHYY in Philadelphia. No response. Such is life for a self-published and incarcerated author. (Sidenote: The following year, Giants did win first place in the Mainstream/Literary Fiction category of the Writer’s Digest Self-Published book awards. A longtime goal and major milestone in my world. But let’s be real—there’s an Everest of altitude between a WDSPBA and a Pulitzer.)

In fairness, I can’t say that Mr. Whitehead is undeserving of the accolades since I’ve never read his work. I plan to though. Some of the best novels I’ve read over these last 18 years in prison were Pulitzers—Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See… Maybe The Nickel Boys will be an upcoming Astral Pipeline Book Club selection. We’ll see if it can stand shoulder to shoulder with these modern classics.

But as I was thumbing through my almanac looking at the various awards for writing—the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Man Booker—a phrase winked up at me from the page. It was in the National Book Award section. In the fine print below the heading were the words Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Letters… Shonda would call this a breadcrumb. A little something from the Universe to let me know I’m on the right path. I thought I was the only one who referred to my novels and essays as letters. Apparently, this was a thing long before I wrote the first words of Consider the Dragonfly. Like centuries before. One of the definitions of letters in the Oxford Dictionary is “literature.” The irony here is that my writing style—if I have a writing style—was cultivated and refined over decades of writing actual letters. Hundreds of them. Letters dating all the way back to the Dade Juvenile Detention Center in 1987; many to strangers, mostly unanswered. Until one day when I decided to write the world a letter in the form of a book.

Hard to believe I’m now on the verge of releasing number seven, a hybrid memoir and essay collection that spans the final nine years of a twenty-year mandatory prison sentence, an era in which I learned to conquer my demons through the redemptive power of writing. Is it Pulitzer caliber? Probably not. But it’s a massive accomplishment in my little corner of captivity, a bookend to a fantastic journey, the best I could do between the years of 2014–2023.

Letters to the Universe, available this Fall from Astral Pipeline Books.