I am currently serving my 24th year of a 28-years-to-life sentence for murder, drug sales, and gun possession at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. I’m a contributing editor at Esquire and my work is regularly featured in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine. My first book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, will publish in September 2025 from Celadon Books, an imprint of Macmillan.
In 2001, when I was a twenty-four-year-old drug dealer and drug addict, I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street. I went to prison with a ninth-grade education and a sentence amounting to more time than I’d been alive. A few years into my bid, one afternoon in the prison yard, I was stabbed six times in the chest. It was then that I decided to take a shot with my life.
After the stabbing, I was transferred to Attica. In 2010, I joined a creative writing workshop where I found my passion. Seriously grappling with my crime was how I started a career as a first-person journalist. In 2013, I landed my first essay, in The Atlantic. The first five words I ever published describe how I feel about the crime I committed: “It was swift and cowardly.”
Soon, I began writing features for magazines, merging memoir with reporting and analysis. As a prison journalist, my edge is my access. I can make someone behind the wall relevant by telling their story to the world. Over the years, I’ve written about love and marriage while incarcerated, college behind bars, and finding housing after release, along with lighter stories about working out and fashion and sports betting in the joint. After I was duped into participating in a cheesy true crime show in 2018, I’ve thought a lot about the stories we tell about crime and punishment. Most of my recent work has been criticism of true crime and the ways the lurid genre exploits tragedy for entertainment.
In 2019, my Esquire story “‘This Place is Crazy’”, about the treatment of prisoners with mental illness, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. In 2019, my essay “The Apology Letter” was published in the Washington Post Magazine’s Special Prison Issue which won the National Magazine Award for Single-Topic Issue. My first big swing at criticism, “Peddling Darkness” in The New York Review of Books, was a finalist for the 2024 National Magazine Award in Reviews & Criticism. I have received fellowships from Galaxy Gives and Haymarket Books/Mellon Foundation, and my work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing.
I sit on the Board of Advisors at the Prison Journalism Project, and have consulted with several organizations and institutions, including PEN America, Freedom Reads, and the Prison Letters Project. For the past several years, I’ve also been mentoring my peers. More than material success, I know what personal journalism can give to guys in prison who are looking to become something more: the opportunity to grapple with what they’ve done on the page and the ability to cultivate empathy for subjects who are in the midst of their own struggles toward redemption. I briefly led my own writing workshop at Sullivan Correctional Facility, before the prison was closed in 2024. During that short period, seven of nine attendees were published, most for the first time. I wrote about the experience in an essay, “Finding the Story,” for The New York Review of Books.
My first book, The Tragedy of True Crime, is my attempt to upend traditional true crime and tell fuller stories of four men who killed—myself included. It publishes on September 23, 2025.
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