I owe my byline to the OG cartoon character Space Ghost—he was Batman cool before Batman—and he was on the screen when I witnessed my first murder at 11 years old. Mixing Comeback and Baby Lax with powder cocaine at 12 taught me ’bout chemistry. Serving deftly sliced slivers of that off-white death to fiends from a Diamondback BMX bike outside Nick’s Liquor til’ 4 am gamed me up in the art of persuasion—shout out to Toastmasters.
Driving my momma around at 13 to construction sites so she could prostitute herself to roofers on lunch break for $50 quickies in the back of the busted Ford Econoline van we lived in for a homeless summer while I sat in the driver’s seat counting crumpled $1s, $5s, and $10s (never saw a $20), and timing each stabbing cabin session by each Fleetwood Mac song in the 8-track player taught me bout economics—and misogyny. If that van could talk…
Star Wars let me imagine a distant alternative possibility, while the arcade became a dark alley best friend distraction—hella tokens in the slot. Alfred E. Newman’s MAD Magazine taught me about satire, introduced my Etch-A-Sketch skills to iconography, and gave me quiet permission to clown the endless tragedy that rained down on my urchin existence. When momma OD’d for the fourth time, I took her to the local pimp Willie Roscoe instead of the hospital, to avoid mando foster care. He took us in, nursed her to half-assed health, made momma his bottom bi–, and put me on the blade to run his harem of runaway snow bunnies. I was 14. Pardon the vernacular y’all—as Doc wrote in 289-128, “This not that poem.”
This be who I really be underneath the buttoned up square piece verbiage yo conventionalism requires me to serve up in the name of etiquette, journalism, and sound grammar. F convention. Just once, I’m a give it to you raw, no filter, no cut, and without apology.
Writing from prison is more than a vocation—this is archival work. We are the historians of the carceral state community. Our work is also pedagogy if harnessed properly. We’re not here to be praised, gawked at, or to serve as the prison’s PR machine—leave that to the prison newspapers. I am OF the gutter, earned my GED from juvenile hall at 16 while waist-deep in a murder trial, and now have multiple college degrees earned only from colleges situated inside adult and youth prison settings—if I had one, my yearbook would be filled with booking photos. Mine is an acquired perspective that is sure to jilt the status quo.
The past year has been a whirlwind of discovery, inspiration, disappointment, and loss. Meeting so many amazing strangers who have become friends and allies engaged in this work has been the most humbling experience—it never gets old. Watching the national news report on the murder of Michael Latt broke my heart. Losing a person like him who came into our prison and gave us his hand crushed my belief in people. Those who lean into our lives are few, and so, to lose even one has an exponential ripple of bad consequences that extend out over many years of lost possibility. I had to cry, suck it up, keep writing, dreaming, ideating, and building the spaceship I believe will change the way our community activates.
I discovered a secret about San Quentin Prison (SQP) that wasn’t such a secret—more so an open source inconvenience—that should have been centered for those discussing confederate monuments, reparations, or the recall of our Governor. Wardens kidnapping Black youth offenders and selling them into slavery on the auction block can’t be good, right? Hello? Where are all the abolitionist historians? At the very least, the record of SQP’s first Warden should have been reported on for its historical gravity by the “journalists” at the San Quentin News, at least once. It wasn’t. They’ve suppressed it.
Meanwhile, I’ve door knocked on every academic I might have ever hoped to engage, and had every one of them who received the S.O.S. message in a bottle, look down, pull me up, and breathe a little wind into my sail—our collective sail—in solidarity with our cause. Nobody has told us “no.” While a few existing players in the prison media landscape have watched us work without helping us, I am forever grateful to the many incredibly esteemed and selfless authors, scholars, artists, and activists who have made time for me, indulged my ambitions, and collaborated to help me build something that expands how confined people can avoid the civil d e a t h prisons were designed to deliver. I will never be able to compensate them for their contributions.
I found out recently that I will become nominated soon for the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) Stillwater “Prison Journalist of the Year” award, which I consider a great honor. Our community aspires to form an SPJ chapter and build on what the Witness platform has developed thus far. I won’t win of course, but at least my peers within the Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild will see that there is possibility for us to explore. Working from outside the prison-sponsored newspaper paradigm is an insurgent sort of activism that best exemplifies what free speech is.
Publishing within a public-facing digital news platform that is cited by prison newspapers as a fact source, confers its affirming credibility of the work. We are operating within a legitimate newsroom. Populating the platform with more copy than any other confined journalist in the nation throughout 2024 wasn’t just a race to flood the zone, either. The multi-categorical dynamism of our diverse content, and the bravery with which we took on our own DOC apparatus—at great personal risk—should be compared against everyone else’s copy, particularly those who don’t speak truth to institutional power. I’m proud of our copy—I stand on that.
Willie Roscoe was killed in a murder-robbery during my 7th-grade year. I came home to the motel room he operated out of to find him shot in the head, his jerry curl caked in blood, and cocaine still frosted on his flared nostrils. His eyes were wide and he was sucking the shag carpet in a haunting death pose. My momma was face down dead in a murky vomit-filled tub with a syringe floating like a Rubber Ducky. Whoever hit them only got the dope and Scoe’s chains—they’d missed the 30 racks duffled in the floor underneath the recliner, and didn’t bother with his pinky nugget ring. I stepped into his bloodied shell-toes, wrestled the ring over his ashy knuckle, grabbed the keys to his emerald green El Dorado, and bounced out like I’d never been there. I drove until I couldn’t.
Trauma is a silent assassin. This is me screaming into the void and reminding you that we come to this work with scars you can’t see, demons we can’t outrun, and mistakes we can’t undo. I whipped, cooked, cut, and slung crack because Willie taught me how. My momma showed me too much, too fast, and chaotic trauma swallowed my very childhood. Now it’s burping me back up.
To my fellow writers, may you be inspired. To the many PhDs and JDs who have danced with this cutout Ghost in order to stand behind our community of emerging voices, I say “thank you.” For those standing right next to us—you know who you are—we salute you. To E, K, B.T., and 2.0—truest allies—I hope we prove ourselves worthy of your support. 2024 has proven to be a pivot point, and our trajectory in 2025 will introduce a dozen new confined contributors around the country. It has been an honor to appear in this forum, center my peers, amplify amazing programs, and critique those things we all know are suspect.
I send my deepest gratitude to David Greenwald, Sophie Yoakum, and Shriya Chittapuram for being the collective human land bridge that has enabled our work to exist.
