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Posted
July 19, 2024
Category
politics, the middle way / moderation
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Not Your Father’s Party

“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party . . . The Democratic Party left me.”

I was surprised to hear this quote attributed to Ronald Reagan. Widely acknowledged as the greatest Republican of the modern era, I just assumed he was a lifer. Not a convert. Makes me wonder what turned him off. What was the tipping point? Vietnam? Roe v. Wade? The Carter-era recession?

Imagine how he would feel today. Democrats are about 1,000 clicks to the left of where they were back when he was roaming the halls of the White House. I barely recognize them, and I’ve been leaning leftward since I first heard the words criminal justice reform. What do you think Mr. Reagan would make of drag queen story hour or woke twitter or gender-neutral pronouns? No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, I think we can agree on what the great man’s reaction might be. Something along the lines of Wtf?

But I doubt he would he recognize the Republican Party either. Not this 2024 version. I know I sure as hell don’t. And I’m not even talking about the tattoo-faced influencers addressing the once puritanical Republican National Convention. Or Hulk Hogan. I’m talking policy . . . core beliefs . . . political philosophy.

All my life, Republicans have been hawkish on war and interventionism while also pro-Wall Street and big business. They were the boring old adults in the room who served as a check on those wild-eyed liberals with their radical ideas. Democrats, on the other hand, once represented the anti-war movement abroad and at home, and marched in lockstep with the unions. While their “trickle-down-economics” Republican counterparts fought for the fat bottom lines of America’s corporate world, Democrats fought for the working man.

Those days are over.

I was blown away on Monday night when Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters union addressed the RNC. And he pulled zero punches. A crowd that earlier booed patron saint of Kentucky Mitch McConnell, applauded when this guy spoke of corporate greed and fair wages. Applauded. Then on Wednesday night, Ohio Senator and Vice President hopeful J.D. Vance exalted the American worker and took a decided swipe at “Wall Street barons.” He also laid into a government that sent young men off to die in Iraq, and he is probably the most vocal senator when it comes to defunding the war effort in Ukraine.

I’m not sure what the endgame is. A lot of that depends on their fearless leader who, like Reagan, recently survived an assassination attempt. One thing is clear—this is not your father’s Republican Party.

—July 18, 2024

Posted
July 15, 2024
Category
gun violence, politics, the middle way / moderation
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July 13

“There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen,” Lenin once said. I think America just experienced one of those weeks.

First, we had the Clooney op-ed in the New York Times imploring President Biden to bow out of the election, followed by speculation on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and other outlets that Obama was behind it all, followed by the unscripted press conference that Biden called to quell rumors about the decline of his cognitive ability, which had not even begun when he mistakenly introduced Ukrainian President Zelensky as “President Putin” at a NATO Summit. But all these will be minor footnotes in the annals of history compared with what happened at the end of the week.

Saturday, July 13, 2024. 6:15pm EST. Like the space shuttle Challenger, the OJ verdict, 9-11, and January 6th, I think it’s safe to say that most Americans will remember exactly where they were when they saw the footage of the attempted assassination of Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump. The speech, the shots, the screams, the blood, the raised fist, the chants of “USA!”

Twenty-four hours later, I’m sitting on the floor of my cell trying to process it all. The ripple effects. The crossroads at which our nation finds itself. The danger, the heroism, the firefighter dad who lost his life, the other two people who were critically injured, the shouts at the press, “You did this!”, the motive of the 20-year-old shooter, and above it all, the iconic image of the bloodied former President saying “Fight! Fight!” as he was whisked into the armored Beast by the Secret Service.

Lots to unpack.

But one thing feels certain here on the eve of the Republican National Convention. The bullet that miraculously grazed Donald Trump’s ear on Saturday evening was a direct hit on the already floundering Biden campaign.

—July 15, 2024

Posted
July 12, 2024
Category
extremes, gun violence, interconnectedness, life philosophy, mass shootings, politics, raising children, the middle way / moderation
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American Exports

An American wearing a "Made in America" t-shirt and holding an American flag.

I’ve been playing a lot of guitar lately. One of the perks of federal prison. The lead guitarist of the band I’m in is named Vinny. At first, I wondered if he was Italian, but it turns out that Vinny is not short for Vincenzo. It’s a nickname. Short for Venezolano. He’s from Venezuela.

If right now you’re thinking “Uh oh. Venezuelan immigrant. Bad hombre alert . . .” that’s understandable, I guess. Between some of the recent tragic news stories and Trump’s alarmist, broad-brush declarations of murderers and rapists, it’s easy to dismiss entire nationalities as horrible people. But for the record, dude is the exact opposite of all that. A gentle spirit who loves rock-n-roll, hates drugs, and teaches a GED class in the education building.

The other night after two hours of Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” Clapton’s “Cocaine,” Stone Temple Pilots’, “Plush” and Velvet Revolver’s “Fall to Pieces,” we were unplugging amps and wrapping mic cords when he started telling me about a Guns N’ Roses concert in Caracas in the early ’90s. The venue was one of those massive South American soccer stadiums. When Axl sat down at the grand piano and played the opening notes of “November Rain,” the sky opened up and a light drizzle began to fall over the 100,000 people in attendance.

As he was telling me this story, I tried to imagine all those G N’ R fans down near the equator. Which made me think of the time I heard Shakira, the pop star from across the Venezuelan border in Colombia, cover AC/DC’s “Back in Black.”  Then I remembered that Kim Jong Il was a huge Elvis fan and that his son, Kim Jong Un, loves the former Chicago Bull, Dennis Rodman. Muhammad Ali’s Thriller in Manilla and Rumble in the Jungle, Michael Jackson’s Bad world tour, Levi’s jeans, Coca-Cola, Motown, muscle cars, baseball, breakdancing, Mississippi Delta blues, Metallica, the Empire State Building, Microsoft, Google, Amazon . . .

Once upon a time, this nation’s greatest export wasn’t any single commodity. It was what rock-n-roll and Levi’s and Coca-Cola represented: The American Spirit. We were the envy of the world. A shining example of everything a free country could be. And as a result, the Berlin wall came down, the cold war ended without a shot being fired, and McDonald’s started popping up all over what was once the U.S.S.R.

But think about it. What have we been exporting lately? School shootings, Capitol riots, border chaos, Fentanyl overdoses, MSNBC, Fox News, hate, division, a citizenry at each other’s throats…

I remember being shocked when the news broke about a horrific school shooting in Thailand last year. Thailand? This was followed by a similar incident in Prague, the first in that country’s history. How many capitol riots—or “sightseeing tours,” if you prefer—have there been since January 6, 2021? I know of at least two: one in Brazil not too long afterward, and there was another last week in Kenya. Coincidence? Probably.

But it’s no coincidence that far right movements and authoritarian strongmen are popping up all over the globe. In the great geopolitical game of Follow the Leader, America sets the tone.  We are the world’s longest running democracy. And for decades our quality of life has been the most powerful argument against dictatorships, autocracies, and communist systems of government.

Liberty, Justice, Honor, Opportunity—these are more than just flowery ideals. They are what make us uniquely US. And they are what inspires the rest of the world to want to be like us. The hope and promise of freedom is our greatest export. Let’s not piss it away.

—July 12, 2024

Posted
July 10, 2024
Category
life philosophy, politics, raising children, Supreme Court, the middle way / moderation
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Cruel and Unusual

Teenager legs with jeans and sneakers dangling from a wall.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear arguments in their next term about a Tennessee law that restricts surgeries for transgender minors as well as other treatments like puberty blockers and hormones.

Am I missing something here? This should be the easiest decision in the history of the high court. A 9-0 slam dunk and an early lunch for the justices.

Tennessee’s Attorney General said the state wants to “ensure that potentially irreversible sex-transition procedures are not provided to young people who may not fully grasp the lifelong consequences and risks.”

It speaks volumes about the overall health of our nation that such a thing would require a law. Much less warrant a Supreme Court battle. My only question is—Is eighteen even old enough to grasp the finality and magnitude of such a decision?

As someone who closely follows SCOTUS rulings in cases involving LWOP sentences (life without parole) for young offenders, I’ll concede that at the moment the legal answer is yes. But a growing amount of neuroscientific research and findings say otherwise. Many of these specialists have written amicus briefs for the court contending that the age at which the adolescent brain reaches maturity is actually closer to 25.

Most conservatives would agree that Justice Sotomayor is the most liberal justice on the court. I like her. Always have. And I usually agree with her. Check out what she has to say about the juvenile brain in her scathing dissent of Jones v. Mississippi, a case where the conservative majority ruled 6–3 in upholding the life sentence of a fifteen-year-old.

“. . . First, as any parent knows and as scientific and sociological studies have confirmed, juveniles are less mature and less responsible than adults which often results in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions. Second, juveniles are more vulnerable and susceptible to negative influences and outside pressures and have less control over their own environment. Finally, the character of a juvenile is more transitory than that of an adult…”

These three signature hallmarks of youth are not merely the observations of the court’s most liberal justice in a fiery dissent. They are stare decisis. Established law. The landmark decision in Roper v. Simmons (2005) uses these same characteristics to outlaw the death penalty for minors. Graham v. Florida (2011) relies on them to ban life sentences for non-homicide juvenile offenders. Miller v. Alabama (2012) held that a mandatory life sentence for any juvenile defendant, regardless of the crime, is unconstitutional. In the court’s opinion, this violated 8th Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to imagine anything more cruel and unusual than a doctor performing a double mastectomy on a confused teenage girl . . . A girl who may feel strongly about something today, only to have those feelings fade entirely by the next school year.

Again—

  • Less maturity resulting in ill-considered actions and decisions
  • More vulnerability and susceptible to outside pressures
  • Character that is more transitory than that of an adult

A season of Hello Kitty turns to Roblox turns to varsity soccer. Blond hair and braces in middle school become a dyed black pixie cut and a nose ring in the eleventh grade. Kids go through multiple phases on the road to adulthood. They are works in progress constantly falling for the illusion that they are finished products.

Maybe this is an oversimplification of a more complex issue. I won’t pretend to know what it’s like to be a teenager in 2024, with all the pressures of high school and social media. And I definitely don’t know what it feels like to be convinced that the opposite sex is trapped in my body.

But I know exactly how it feels to be isolated . . . to feel anxious and awkward and dissatisfied with life, to seek an identity other than white boy Chris; be it musician, drug addict, armed robber, or Malcolm Ivey. I know how it feels to hurt. For years. And what it is like to eventually find peace. To reconcile inner with outer. No surgery required.

America has been failing her children for quite some time. Check out the massive carbon footprint we’re leaving. The leaders we elect. The examples we set. I recently read a study that found that over thirty percent of adolescent girls have considered suicide in their short lives, a rate that rivaled that of combat veterans. This should not be. Not in the greatest country in the history of the world. Saving our kids is the most important issue on the docket these days.

There is no them. Only us.

—July 10, 2024

Posted
July 4, 2024
Category
extremes, life philosophy, politics, the middle way / moderation
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Help Is on the Way

Image of Senator John Fetterman, rooftop with an Israeli flag.
John Fetterman, rooftop with an Israeli flag.

I’ll admit it. I’ve been having a slight existential crisis these last few months. Part of it is due to the fact that I spend most of my days locked in a cell listening to Fox News Radio. Not exactly easy listening for moderate Democrats. Of course, I flip over to NPR occasionally but hearing Terry Gross politely interview some lesbian poet just lacks the apocalyptic pyrotechnics of Jesse Kelly raving about the “Demonic Left.”

Another contributing factor is the growing fatigue from arguing with my fellow prisoners that despite Trump’s First Step Act, despite his endless bemoaning the Justice Department and court system, despite his pardoning of Kodak and Weezy, and despite his own recent criminal convictions; a meandering and geriatric Biden is still the better choice for President, if only for the District, Appellate, and Supreme Court judges he will appoint.

If this sounds like a hard sell, you have no idea.

Recently I wrote about mental maps and how often we ignore incoming information simply because it runs counter to the story we are telling ourselves in our heads. For years, I have rejected the narrative that modern American conservatism has the market cornered when it comes to strength and masculinity. In the face of almost every other song on country music radio, every Clay Travis and Buck Sexton mention of “liberal wimpiness,” every cringe-inducing progressive squad soundbite from Capitol Hill—I have stood firm.

But a few weeks ago, a couple back-to-back news stories forced me to pull my bald head from the proverbial sand. The first was about Trump getting a standing ovation at a Jersey UFC fight. The second was about an LGBTQ parade. These diametrically opposed headlines illustrate and underscore the gravitational force of the Republican Party on the American everyman, regardless of race.

In reality, true strength transcends party affiliation. Picture a soldier carrying a fallen comrade off the battlefield, a cop wading into danger to protect innocent lives, a dad pulling sixty-hour work weeks to support his family, a grandmother taking in the children of incarcerated and addicted parents . . . As I read back over these examples, it occurs to me that there is a parallel through-line running side by side with my understanding of strength—selflessness.

If you are one of the few remaining American male Democrats, and you’re reading this, it’s what drew us to the party, right? Human rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, the elderly, the poor, the marginalized, the mentally ill, and for me at least, the prisoner. Stalwart souls who dedicate their lives to championing the rights of fellow struggling citizens are unbelievably strong. They are unsung American heroes. Badasses.

But again, perception trumps reality. And the current perception is that real men make their political home on the right. The party of God, guns, and country. The party of hard work and cold beer. While on the emasculated left, we have what? Transgender bathroom rights and Palestinian protests.

Recent polls show Trump leading in every battleground state and making significant inroads into long-held Democratic strongholds. Pundits will claim this is due to Biden’s incoherent debate performance, and the party appears to be on the verge of a palace coup to unseat him as the 2024 presidential nominee. But while a quarterback change this late in the fourth might be enough to pull off a thrilling came-from-behind victory in November’s electoral Super Bowl, long-term there are other problems that can no longer be ignored. Not just messaging problems. Core, fundamental, philosophical problems. One of which is that in their burning desire to appear all-inclusive, the DNC has effectively excluded the American male.

Although my access to the free world is limited, I doubt I am the first to have grappled with this. In this nation of 330 million, I’m sure there are other centrists, moderates, independents, and never-Trumpers feeling this way. If so, take heart. A six-foot-eight, pro-Israel, criminal-justice-reforming, glimmer of hope has arrived . . . in a hoodie and shorts.

John Fetterman might just save the Democratic Party.

—July 4, 2024

Posted
July 2, 2024
Category
Criminal Justice Reform, extremes, life philosophy, politics, the middle way / moderation
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Maps

Person in a field holding a globe at their side.

Imagine it’s the year 1624 and you and I are kicked back drinking ale in our powdered wigs when suddenly I take my feathered quill, dip it in ink, and draw you a detailed map of what is now the state of Florida. With one glaring exception… You lean over the flickering candle and frown at the southernmost tip of the peninsula. “Bravo, Malcolm. Well done. However, you appear to have forgotten the tiny string of islands at the bottom.”

I could do one of two things with this new information—investigate and eventually expand my map to include the Florida Keys, or slam down my map, cry “balderdash!” and deny their existence. But I could only deny for so long. At some point it would become absurd to continue to exclude these surveyed, documented, inhabited little geographical facts from my map.

Fifty years ago, psychologist M. Scott Peck was working on a groundbreaking book titled The Road Less Traveled . . . a book that, if released today, college kids would probably call “cringy.” There are admittedly some awkward passages that do not stand the test of time. But again, it was written in the 1970s. “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there . . .” However, there is one concept that has stuck with me ever since I closed the book and put it back on the library shelf. It’s the idea that our belief systems are a kind of mental mapping and that we are the ultimate cartographers.

How often do we reject incoming information—even decline to give it a fair hearing—because it confuses our brains? I catch myself doing this all the time. Especially in the sphere of politics.

Pop quiz: Who has done more for criminal justice reform? Joe Biden or Donald Trump? I can almost hear the collective yawn from the other side of your computer screens, but humor me a minute. Who do you think? If your familiar with my essays or the Miranda Rights series, then you know it pains me to admit that the answer to this question is—

The Donald . . . by a country mile.

In 2018, Trump signed into law a bill called the First Step Act. I remember hearing about it at the time, but I still had five years left to serve on a twenty-year state sentence and the law only applied to federal inmates. I just assumed it was some toothless piece of legislation that only applied to a handful of white-collar criminals.

Upon my arrival in Federal Prison six months ago, I was shocked to learn that many people have been going home early due to this law. A couple days ago, I watched an old lifer reduced to tears when granted compassionate release as a result of the First Step Act.

Maps.

Don’t get me wrong, the FSA is far from perfect. Eligible inmates must take classes to earn credits that will reduce their sentences. Unfortunately, federal prisons are so woefully understaffed that out of a 12-week program, you’d be lucky to attend a couple classes. But the framework is there. It’s something to improve upon. Something that might actually benefit society one day by turning out educated and reformed men and women back into their communities. Not yet, but someday.

A lot of my fellow inmates are convinced that if Trump is re-elected, there will be a Second Step Act that will extend beyond the current nonviolent drug offender demographic. I have doubts. Despite the fact that violent crime is down 40% on average from this time last year, the 24-hour news cycle is pumping a different reality. It would be difficult for any president to get criminal justice reform passed in the current political climate.

In addition to the First Step Act, Trump has promised to pardon all the “J. Sixers” if elected. Think those dudes weren’t happy to see Biden mumbling and stumbling over his words on the debate stage the other night?

And finally, there’s the optics of the mugshot, the 34-count indictment and subsequent guilty verdict, the upcoming sentencing hearing . . . the growing consensus is “Trump feels our pain.” And while I strongly disagree—to feel someone’s pain requires empathy, and the former President has never demonstrated anything remotely close—sometimes perception outweighs reality.

I think Biden understands this better than anyone right now.  Perception outweighing reality could be the theme of this election season. If Joe had been thinking clearly on the debate stage last week, he would have told America about his historic infrastructure bill, he would have touted his brazen CHIPS Act, record unemployment, the successful tightrope act of dodging a recession while taming inflation, the booming stock market, plummeting crime rates . . .

And it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.

Why?

You already know the answer.

Maps.

—July 2, 2024

Posted
March 24, 2024
Category
book excerpt / announcement
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Available Now!

Letters to the Universe: Essays on crime, craft, and the middle way, 2014-2023

Excerpt from Letters to the Universe, available now at Amazon…

I think I had been up for four days when I robbed the second gas station. But it could have been five days or even six. I don’t know. Days run together when they’re not separated by sleep. Armed robbery was a new low, even for me, but then so was crack cocaine. In the six months following my first hit from a crack pipe, I’d lost everything—my car, my job, my girl, my family. I couldn’t stand the weak thing I had become, and by then, I was ready to die. My plan was simple: rob and get high until the police got behind me, then blow my brains out.

Although cocaine is not classified as a hallucinogenic, sleep deprivation most definitely is. And as I was exiting that gas station, I was seeing and hearing all sorts of things—police search lights, sirens, footsteps, voices . . . I hopped into a stolen car and sped away, zigzagging my way through neighborhood streets and charting a course for the nearest dope hole.

As I pulled out onto the main thoroughfare, two things happened that would change my life forever: 1) my headlights stopped working, and 2) a cop was driving by. I checked the rearview to see if he was going to turn around. Of course he was. It was 3 a.m. and I was driving with no headlights in an area where a robbery had just occurred. When he turned on his siren, I stomped on the gas and yanked hard on the steering wheel . . .

. . . and drove straight into a brick mailbox. I bailed out of the car and ran through someone’s yard, tires screeching behind me. Desperate to escape, I sprinted toward the field abutting the backyard but never saw the fence. It was one of those waist-high, rusty barbed wire things and it flipped me upside down. I felt the gun fall from the pocket of my hoodie into the tall grass below. I quickly freed myself, then frantically groped for it in the dark. I couldn’t lose the gun. I needed it to off myself when there was nowhere left to run. But I heard squawking radios and jingling keys approaching. I had to go.

Branches and thorns slapped my face as I tore through the field. I tripped, lost a shoe, tripped again, and finally rolled into a gully and pulled the brush over myself to hide. An hour passed. Helicopters flew overhead, far-off voices shouted, car engines roared. Then the low growl and panting breath of a dog drew close. I could hear it a few feet away, tracking me. Suddenly, the massive head of a German Shepherd poked through the brush. I threw my arms up to keep him from biting my face. He seized my wrist and began ripping flesh from bone. I was quickly surrounded by police and pummeled with flashlights and boots.

But something strange happened in that field. Maybe it was just the dope or the sleep deprivation. Maybe I was in shock, but for a moment, I was hovering over my body, looking down at the scene below. This pitiful crackhead that was me—emaciated, dirty, bloody—being mauled and stomped and finally handcuffed.

If I’d had that gun while I lay there in the bushes with the police closing in, I would have killed myself. There would be no Consider the Dragonfly, no With Arms Unbound, no On the Shoulders of Giants, and you definitely wouldn’t be reading this right now. I’d be just a forgotten news story from the last decade, a dead crackhead in a field. Forgotten, except to my mom, and she would have found a way to blame herself. Instead, it is my belief that something bigger intervened and that has made all the difference. If Malcolm Ivey has a birthday, it’s March 21, 2005, the night I dropped the gun.

—from Divine Intervention, April 2017

Posted
October 3, 2023
Category
book excerpt / announcement, writing
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Letters to the Universe

Cover image for "Letters to the Universe" showing a mountain peak mailbox against a starry night sky.
(Cover image by Bobby Marko of wefoundadventure.com)

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.

Posted
October 3, 2023
Category
book excerpt / announcement
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Coming Soon!

Letters to the Universe

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.

(Cover image by Bobby Marko of wefoundadventure.com)

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