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Author: Diane Schoemperlen
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1443434221
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
From the Governor General’s Award winning author of Forms of Devotion, Our Lady of the Lost and Found and By the Book “Never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer.” For almost six turbulent years, award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen was involved with a prison inmate serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. The relationship surprised no one more than her. How do you fall in love with a man with a violent past? How do you date someone who is in prison? This Is Not My Life is the story of the romance between Diane and Shane—how they met and fell in love, how they navigated passes and parole and the obstacles facing a long-term prisoner attempting to return to society, and how, eventually, things fell apart. While no relationship takes place in a vacuum, this is never more true than when that relationship is with a federal inmate. In this candid, often wry, sometimes disturbing memoir, Schoemperlen takes us inside this complex and difficult relationship as she journeys through the prison system with Shane. Not only did this relationship enlarge her capacity for both empathy and compassion, but it also forced her to more deeply examine herself.
Author: Diane Schoemperlen
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1443434221
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the Governor General’s Award winning author of Forms of Devotion, Our Lady of the Lost and Found and By the Book “Never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer.” For almost six turbulent years, award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen was involved with a prison inmate serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. The relationship surprised no one more than her. How do you fall in love with a man with a violent past? How do you date someone who is in prison? This Is Not My Life is the story of the romance between Diane and Shane—how they met and fell in love, how they navigated passes and parole and the obstacles facing a long-term prisoner attempting to return to society, and how, eventually, things fell apart. While no relationship takes place in a vacuum, this is never more true than when that relationship is with a federal inmate. In this candid, often wry, sometimes disturbing memoir, Schoemperlen takes us inside this complex and difficult relationship as she journeys through the prison system with Shane. Not only did this relationship enlarge her capacity for both empathy and compassion, but it also forced her to more deeply examine herself.
Author: Qisheng Jiang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442212225
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
In 1999, the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, leading dissident Jiang Qisheng was given a four-year sentence for inviting the Chinese people to light candles to honor the victims. Drawn with indignant intensity from Jiang's time in prison, his memoirs offer compelling observations of two of the three modern, "civilized" Beijing jails in which he was held. Along with intriguing vignettes of his fellow prisoners, Jiang describes both brutally dehumanizing conditions and rare moments of unexpected kindness. Prisoners, used as slave labor, become "skinned" through malnutrition and exhaustion, while facing new depths of mental degradation. Throughout, however, Jiang retained his dignity, detached and perceptive intelligence, and concern for his fellow sufferers, guards included. Writing in his signature light and ironic style, Jiang's stories of prisoners, who come from the most primitive and impoverished layer of Chinese society, are related with vividness, insight, humor, and compassion. Dismayed by their fatalistic docility, the author asks, "Where lies China's hope? Can democracy ever take root in China?" The answers, surely, lie in the voices of those, like Jiang, who dare to speak out.
Author: Nawāl Saʻdāwī
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520088887
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
"If Kafka had been a feminist, his prisoner might have had Nawal el Sa'adawi's feistiness, maybe, like her, he would have hoed a prison garden, led veiled and unveiled cellmates in rebellious calisthenics, strategized with a murderess to foil state illogic. This book gives me hope, even makes me laugh."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After
Author: Ian Manuel
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984897985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The inspiring story of activist and poet Ian Manuel, who at the age of fourteen was sentenced to life in prison. He survived eighteen years in solitary confinement—through his own determination and dedication to art—until he was freed as part of an incredible crusade by the Equal Justice Initiative. “Ian is magic. His story is difficult and heartbreaking, but he takes us places we need to go to understand why we must do better. He survives by relying on a poetic spirit, an unrelenting desire to succeed, to recover, and to love. Ian’s story says something hopeful about our future.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy The United States is the only country in the world that sentences thirteen- and fourteen-year-old offenders, mostly youth of color, to life in prison without parole. In 1991, Ian Manuel, then fourteen, was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. In a botched mugging attempt with some older boys, he shot a young white mother of two in the face. But as Bryan Stevenson, attorney and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has insisted, none of us should be judged by only the worst thing we have ever done. Capturing the fullness of his humanity, here is Manuel’s powerful testimony of growing up homeless in a neighborhood riddled with poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse—and of his efforts to rise above his circumstances, only to find himself, partly through his own actions, imprisoned for two-thirds of his life, eighteen years of which were spent in solitary confinement. Here is the story of how he endured the savagery of the United States prison system, and how his victim, an extraordinary woman, forgave him and bravely advocated for his freedom, which was achieved by an Equal Justice Initiative push to address the barbarism of our judicial system and bring about “just mercy.” Full of unexpected twists and turns as it describes a struggle for redemption, My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art—in Ian Manuel’s case, through his dedication to writing poetry.
Author: Silvio Pellico
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, Italian
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Author: Deborah Jiang-Stein
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807098108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
A deeply personal and inspiring memoir recounting one woman’s struggles—beginning with her birth in prison—to find self-acceptance Prison Baby is a revised and substantially expanded version of Deborah Jiang Stein’s self-published memoir, Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus. Even at twelve years old, Deborah, the adopted daughter of a progressive Jewish couple in Seattle, felt like an outsider. Her mixed Asian features set her apart from her white, well-intentioned parents who evaded questions about her past. But when she discovered a letter revealing the truth of her prison birth to a heroin-addicted mother—and that she spent the first year of life in prison—Deborah spiraled into emotional lockdown. For years she turned to drugs, violence, and crime as a way to cope with her grief. Ultimately, Deborah overcame the stigma, shame, and secrecy of her birth, and found peace by helping others—proving that redemption and acceptance are possible even from the darkest corners.
Author: Alexander Berkman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anarchism
Languages : en
Pages : 560
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Book Description
Author: Rosalind Boone Williams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761871489
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
Serving Time Too: A Memoir of My Son’s Prison Years is the universally accessible story of a mother and son: what she knew about him; what she will never understand; how she helped him, and when she needed to let him go. But Rosalind Williams’ memoir is unique because her unconditional love for Marell persisted after his conviction for murder. During his sixteen years in prison and for two-and-a-half years after his release, every aspect of Rosalind’s life was affected by her fidelity to him and by the failures of a penal system tinged with racial and class inequities. Rosalind tells a personal story with enormous significance to society. She is an unflinchingly fair, sometimes self-critical narrator who reflects upon the enticements of violence and crime, especially for African American young men, despite the values they are taught at home. Her experiences demonstrate the damage that crime and punishment inflict upon those good people who stand by loved ones during and after incarceration. This memoir will comfort anyone related to the 2.3 million people behind bars in the United States. Others will hear a call to reform and, more importantly, they will feel compassion for the offender’s family, and the offender. No other book in print takes Rosalind’s perspective on the problems of crime and incarceration.
Author: Leonard Peltier
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250119286
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
The Native American activist recounts his evolution into a political organizer, his trial and conviction for murder, and his spiritual journey in prison. In September of 2022, twenty-five years after Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents, the Democratic National Committee unanimously passed a resolution urging President Joe Biden to release him. Peltier has affirmed his innocence ever since his sentencing in 1977—his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen’s bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse—and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. A wise and unsettling book, Prison Writings is both memoir and manifesto, chronicling Peltier’s life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. He also locates his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government’s injustices. Edited by Harvey Arden, with an introduction by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and a preface by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Praise for Prison Writings “It would be inadequate to describe Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings as a classic of prison literature, although it is that. It is also a cry for help, an accusation against monstrous injustice, a beautiful expression of a man’s soul, demanding release.” —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States “For too long, both Leonard’s supporters and detractors have seen him as a metaphor, as a public figure worthy of political rallies and bumper stickers, but very rarely as a private man who only wants to go home. I pray this book will bring Leonard home.” —Sherman Alexie, author of Indian Killer
Author: Shaka Senghor
Publisher: Convergent Books
ISBN: 1101907312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary, unforgettable” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow) memoir of redemption and second chances amidst America’s mass incarceration epidemic, from a member of Oprah’s SuperSoul 100 Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor—but at age eleven, his parents’ marriage began to unravel, and beatings from his mother worsened, which sent him on a downward spiral. He ran away from home, turned to drug dealing to survive, and ended up in prison for murder at the age of nineteen, full of anger and despair. Writing My Wrongs is the story of what came next. During his nineteen-year incarceration, seven of which were spent in solitary confinement, Senghor discovered literature, meditation, self-examination, and the kindness of others—tools he used to confront the demons of his past, forgive the people who hurt him, and begin atoning for the wrongs he had committed. Upon his release at age thirty-eight, Senghor became an activist and mentor to young men and women facing circumstances like his. His work in the community and the courage to share his story led him to fellowships at the MIT Media Lab and the Kellogg Foundation and invitations to speak at events like TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival. In equal turns, Writing My Wrongs is a page-turning portrait of life in the shadow of poverty, violence, and fear; an unforgettable story of redemption; and a compelling witness to our country’s need for rethinking its approach to crime, prison, and the men and women sent there.
