I was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a hard-working single mom and grew up in a housing project in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and in Hell’s Kitchen. I’m currently serving a 28-years-to-life sentence at Sullivan Correctional Facility for murder, drug sales and gun possession. I’m a contributing editor at Esquire and a contributing writer at the Marshall Project. My work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere.
As a young man immersed in the street life, I shot and killed an associate while selling drugs. Imprisoned at Attica, I took college courses and learned the craft of creative writing in a workshop taught by a volunteer English professor, an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, my first essay, “A Convicted Murderer’s Case for Gun Control,“ was published by The Atlantic. Later, I began writing features for magazines, merging memoir with reporting and analysis of social justice issues. As a prison journalist, my edge is my access — to the stories all around me, and the passion within me to bring the voices of my peers on the inside to a wider audience.
My story “This Place is Crazy,” about the treatment of prisoners with mental illness, ran in the Summer 2018 issue of Esquire and was nominated for the 2019 National Magazine Awards/Feature Writing. My writing was anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2019, and I was a finalist for the 2019 Molly National Journalism Prize. In 2020, my story “The Apology Letter” appeared in the Washington Post Magazine’s Special Prison Issue, which won a National Magazine Award for Single-Topic Issue. I also hosted the podcast “This Is A Collect Call From Sing Sing” on PodcastOne. I sit on the board of advisors at Prison Journalism Project and have received fellowships from Galaxy Gives and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Currently, I am writing a book about true crime.