Authors: Bell Gale Chevigny
Admiring the works of Sinclair Lewis, he adopted Sinclair as a middle name.
Lewis has published articles, poems, and stories in the
Philadelphia Daily News, North Coast Xpress,
the
Other Side Magazine,
and other journals. He won third prize in non-fiction for “Sweeter than Sugar”(1987) and first prize in poetry for “In the Big Yard” (1988). He has published
Where I'm Writing From: Essays from Pennsylvania's Death Row
and two collections of poetry:
Leaving Death Row
and
Inside My Head.
A third collection,
Psalms of Death Row,
is forthcoming.
Lori Lynn McLuckie
(b.1961) was born and raised in New Jersey. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She earned a B.A. in Literature in 1984 and moved to Colorado shortly thereafter.
Since 1988, McLuckie has been serving a term of forty years to life for the first-degree murder of her abusive boyfriend. During her incarceration, she has trained many assistance dogs for handicapped people through Colorado Correctional Industries as well as Freedom Service Dogs, Inc. This work is very dear to her.
“Trina Marie” won first prize for poetry in 1992. The real Trina Marie has been living successfully in freedom since 1993, McLuckie says. Writers she admires include Ernest Hemingway, Oliver Sacks, Agatha Christie, Dan Brown, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen, and Bob Dylan. McLuckie continues to pursue her own writing. “It's all about having a voice,” she says.
Jarvis Jay Masters
(b.1962) was born in Torrance, California, and raised in a series of foster homes in southern California. A number of holdups led him to San Quentin in 1981. There he was convicted of conspiracy in the 1985 killing of a corrections officer despite the fact that he was in another part of the prison when the crime was committed. During his death penalty trial he happened on the writings of Tibetan Buddhist lama Chagdud Tilku Rinpoche. “For a long time I was my own stranger,” Masters writes, “but everything I went through in learning how to accept myself brought me to the doorsteps of dharma, the Buddhist path.” In
Finding Freedom: A Buddhist on Death Row,
he describes Rinpoche's visits, his own meditation, and his evolution into a “peace activist” among the condemned.
In 2009, Masters' second book
That Bird has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row,
was published by HarperOne. He sought to tell his story without blaming others. “In essence, questioning my own sincerity is what inspired this book,” Masters says. “Many times just the memories made me want to quit writing,” he writes. “At times I literally cursed the makeshift pen caught painfully between my fngers. There was no name I did not call it. It was not just that it hurt to hold it, but that it moved so slowly, forcing me to attend to every detail. I couldn't write any faster than it let me; it refused to skim lightly over the surface as I tried to breeze past the unpronounced emotions that would crawl up my throat and fill my eyes with tears. The filler's slow pace repeatedly dragged me into a swamp of unwanted memories. Only through the patience learned in meditation was I able to settle myself into a place that allowed me to keep writing.” The book was a finalist for the Creative Nonfiction Award of PEN Center USA, and named a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Selection in 2009. Masters' poem “Recipe for Prison Pruno” won a PEN Prison Writing prize in 1992.
After being held for twenty-two years in the Adjustment Center of death row, where he could have no contact visits and make no phone calls, Masters was returned in 2007 to the general death row population.
In the same year, the California Supreme Court reviewed Masters' habeas corpus appeal and issued a broad Order to Show Cause that granted him an evidentiary hearing to look at new evidence that may prove his innocence. The evidentiary hearing concluded in April 2011, and he currently awaits a decision on his freedom from the California Supreme Court.
After
Diane Hamill Metzger
(b.1949) finished high school near her native Philadelphia, she postponed college, intending to go on in a few years. “But then life blinked,” she says. She married a man who later killed his ex-wife during a custody fight, while Metzger and her infant son were outside in the car. Although she had done no violence, she says she did aid her husband in the cover-up and was a fugitive with him and their baby for over a year before being arrested in Boise, Idaho. For accomplice liability, she received a life sentence. In Pennsylvania, there is no parole for lifers, and, according to Metzger, only 30 out of 3000 lifers have had their sentences commuted in the past twenty yea rs.
Among other awards, Metzger has won citations from Pennsylvania's House of Representatives and Senate for being the first female to earn, while incarcerated, a baccalaureate degree. She also holds an A.A. in Business Administration, certification as a Paralegal, and a Master's in Humanities/History. She won honorable mentions in poetry (1978, 1988), third prize in fiction (1981), first in poetry (1985) for “Uncle Adam,” and an honorable mention (2005) for “Panopticon.” First published at age twelve, she has work in
Pearl, Anima,
and
Collages and Brico-lages,
as well as her own chapbook,
Coralline Ornaments.
To be closer to her family, Metzger received a “hardship” transfer to the women's prison in Delaware in 1995. She lived in a minimum security unit, in the “honor” pod, and enjoyed her jobs: paralegal in the Law Library, clerk in the Treatment Services Department, and prison photographer. When a new warden arrived late in 2010, Metger began receiving “bogus misconduct charges” and was put in solitary for three months. In June 2011, she was sent back to Pennsylvania and labeled “an escape risk,” though she had been found not guilty of a charge of attempted escape recently in Delaware.
Vera Montgomery
(1936â1962) was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, where she died. Beginning in her teens, she spent much of her life in Edna Mahan Correctional Institution for Women in Clinton. “No one could forget Vera,” Lois Morris, former assistant superintendent, says. “She was very bright and had a delightful sense of humor, though from the administrative point of view, she was a management problem. Her philosophy was that rules were made to be broken.” When the Supreme Court mandated that prisons have law libraries, Montgomery became a full-time jailhouse lawyer, helping other women with appeals and representing them in disciplinary hearings.
Montgomery had “absolute integrity and fought like a fiend for what she thought right,” according to her attorney, Raymond A. Brown, who represented her successfully in a case involving escape and assault. Montgomery became director of the Inmate Legal Association. Jennie Brown, then a member of the State Advisory Board of Control, knew Montgomery well. “She developed herself in prison, she became a talented tailor and a leader. Being fearless, Vera was always prepared to help staff with an inmate in crisis.”
“Solidarity with cataracts” won first prize for poetry in 1976. Albert Montgomery remembers his favorite aunt as “a good-hearted person and a loyal friend.” In Clinton prison, she was president of the women lifers' group.“She was always creative,” her nephew recalls. Near the end of her life, she told him that she wanted to write a book.
Robert J Moriarty
(b.1946) was born in Schenectady and raised in the West. A former U.S. Marine fighter pilot, he flew 833 combat missions from July 1968 to March 1970 in Vietnam and was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses and forty-one Air Medals in addition to several citations from South Vietnam, including the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He was also distinguished for being the youngest Navy/Marine pilot in Vietnam, having started flying combat as a twnety-year-old second lieutenant and becoming a captain at the age of twenty-two. Five years after leaving the service, Moriarty became a trans-oceanic ferry pilot and a part-time long-distance racer. His logbooks show twelve thousand hours total time, over 240 trans-oceanic crossings and first place in two New York-to-Paris air races flying his favorite Bonanza V-35. On a lark, he became the first person in history to fly through the arches of the Eiffel tower in March of 1984;
Air-Space
published his account in October, 1986.
“Pilots in the War on Drugs” took first prize in nonfiction in 1989 and “Against the Prohibition of Drugs” won second prize in 1990. How did he become a writer? “I just sat down and started writing.” He has also published in aviation magazines and currently runs a successful business.
Paul Mulryan
(b.1954), born in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and raised in Savannah, Georgia, was arrested in Batavia, Ohio, for aggravated robbery and gun charges in 1983. In prison in Lucasville, he studied printing and industrial electricity and took three years of college courses in liberal arts, focusing on art, writing, and music theory. Later apprenticing in the electric shop at Mansfield Prison, he painted and taught music theory for guitar. Mulryan says he has no favorite writers, though he has always been moved by Sylvia Plath's poetry.
“Eleven Days Under Siege: An Insider's Account of the Lucasville Riot,” won first prize for nonfiction in 1995. It was first published in
Prison Life,
along with one of his paintings. His story, “My Sister's Letter,” was published in
The Right Words at the Right Time,
vol. 2., edited by Marlo Thomas.
He was released from prison in 2008.
Patrick Nolan
(1963-2000), of “Cabbagetown,” an Irish neighborhood in Toronto, grew up in boys' homes and on the street, and at age sixteen went to prison for three years. After two years of freedom, he says, “I gave up on life. Instead of ending what I commonly refer to as my wretched existence I took the coward's way out, taking the life of another.” At Folsom Prison (Sacramento) he spent two years in the hole, reading and writing essays about what he felt.
“The person who changed my life was Victor Franklâhis book,
Man's Search for Meaning.
I also fell in love with the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau. When I was finally released from the hole I had only one purposeâto transform my life.” Thanks to the California Arts-in-Corrections program, he took a workshop with a professional poet, Dianna Henning. “In poetry I have found a process to look inward and find meaning to what I considered an otherwise meaningless life.” he wrote. Among influences, he cites Robert Bly, Robert Hayden, Etheridge Knight, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Eventually Nolan facilitated the poetry workshop himself. “If guys can get a taste for what poetry offers,” Nolan wrote, “it will stir the souls of those who secretly long to be heard.”
“Ol' Man Motown” was written in the aftermath of a race riot, in which Motown was attacked. During the lockdown following the riot, Nolan began to see race hatred as self-hatred projected outward. He persuaded the chaplain to co-facilitate gatherings of men of all races to share their thoughts and feelings as they never could in the yard. The men's groups that Nolan founded continue to meet in Folsom to this day.
In 2000, hepatitis C forced Nolan's move to Vacaville Medical Facility. When he was dying, the Folsom prison chaplain was prevented from seeing him. But an extraordinary exception was made at Folsom, and memorial services were held in the two prison yards where Nolan was best known.
Charles P. Norman
(b.1949) attributes his storytelling to his grandmother, who told him tales of pioneer life in Texas, where he spent his early years. He studied at the University of South Carolina. After the deterioration of his marriage, he became involved in financial crimes, and later was convicted of a murder that had occurred three years earlier.
Serving a life sentence in Florida prisons, Norman won a MENSA scholarship that allowed him to continue his college education. He also studied business, computers, printing, graphic arts, horticulture, and law, all of which skills he put to use. He taught classes in computers, writing, English for Speakers of Other Languages, and G.E.D. Prep, and he worked in a prisoner self-help program and a boot camp for young first-time offenders.
“Pearl Got Stabbed” won an honorable mention in the prison writing contest in 1992. The Actors Studio in New York performed Norman's “Tattoo Blues,” winning first prize in drama from
Prison Life.
Norman won many prizes in fiction, essay, memoir, poetry, and drama over the years, culminating in 2009 with the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Prison Writing Program. Most recently, his memoir, “Fighting The Ninja,” about AIDS in prison, won first prize in the PEN contest and was published in the
Journal of Prisoners on Prison,
Vol. 19, No. 1, 2010.
Although confined for thirty-three years, Norman has embraced the Internet age and is featured on a web site, www.freecharlienow.com. Two of his essays were published on www.thecrimereport.org. As a contributor to the Anne Frank Center USA Prison Diary Project, Norman was interviewed by the Associated Press. Scores of his essays have been posted on a blog, http://charlienorman.blogspot.com.
In 2010 Norman spent thirty days in solitary confinement after his memoir, “To Protect The Guilty,” about Ku Klux Klan prison guards, was published in an anthology. When he brought a lawsuit over this retaliation, he was punitively transferred to a unit far from his friends. He is currently fighting for his freedom in Florida courts and working on a memoir, “Chain Gang Mating Rituals,” a short story collection, and a novel.
When
Judee Norton
was born in 1949 in an Arizona farm town, her father was a twenty-two-year-old farm boy, one of ten children, and her mother was one of thirteen children of itinerant fruit-and-cotton pickers, “a fifteen-year-old beauty with the look of gypsies about her,” as Norton writes. Norton and her four siblings battled a legacy of “addiction, poverty, low self-esteem, and a general sense of bewilderment about the business of living.” But “when l read, I was somewhere else. I was no longer the oldest child in the most dysfunctional family in the universe. Writing was magic and I wanted to be a magician, to take people out of what was awful to another place.”