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Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer
University of Arizona Press
October 2007
On Sale: October 1, 2007
256 pages
ISBN: 0816525951
EAN: 9780816525959
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Ever since he was asked to critique the poetry of a
convicted murderer, he has lived in two worlds.Richard
Shelton was a young English professor in 1970 when a convict
named Charles Schmid—a serial killer dubbed the “Pied Piper
of Tucson” in national magazines—shared his brooding verse.
But for Shelton, the novelty of meeting a death-row monster
became a thirty-year commitment to helping prisoners express
themselves.Shelton began organizing creative writing
workshops behind bars, and in this gritty memoir he offers
up a chronicle of reaching out to forgotten men and
women—and of creativity blossoming in a repressive
environment. He tells of published students such as Paul
Ashley, Greg Forker, Ken Lamberton, and Jimmy Santiago Baca
who have made names for themselves through their writing
instead of their crimes.Shelton also recounts the
bittersweet triumph of seeing work published by men who
later met with agonizing deaths, and the despair of seeing
the creative strides of inmates broken by politically
motivated transfers to private prisons. And his memoir
bristles with hard-edged experiences, ranging from inside
knowledge of prison breaks to a workshop conducted while a
riot raged outside a barricaded door.Reflecting on his
decision to tutor Schmid, Shelton sees that the choice “has
led me through bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments
to a better understanding of what it means to be human.”
Crossing the Yard is a rare story of professional
fulfillment—and a testament to the transformative power of
writing.
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