Curtis Dawkins

Curtis Dawkins would never have written the stories in his first published collection if he hadn’t murdered a man, said in The New York Times. The Illinois native had earned an MFA in fiction writing years before he shot a Michigan stranger dead during a drug-crazed night in 2004. But only after Dawkins was incarcerated and had spent 10 months in a suicidal depression did he launch into the first of the stories about life behind bars that appear in his just-released debut, The Graybar Hotel. “A part of me realized, if I’m going to live through this, I’m going to have to find a purpose,” he says. Now 12 years into a life sentence, he isn’t asking for forgiveness, though even he can’t explain why he did what he did. “I don’t want to blame the drugs and say that it wasn’t me,” he says, “because part of it was me.”

Scribner took a publicrelations risk when it signed Dawkins, but his stories have won praise, and he appears proud, said

in Bookweb.org, to be helping make the world of America’s 2 million inmates better understood by outsiders. “A person cannot write, or make art, with an agenda,” he says. “But I do want to give a voice to the poorest and most uneducated among us. I wanted to tell these guys’ stories.” Dawkins, who maintains a strong relationship with the mother of his two children, long ago was forced to break his addictions to alcohol and heroin, and now hopes readers can see his incarcerated peers as he does. “It is time you knew the frightening truth,” he says. “Prisoners are people just like you and your loved ones.”