Tiyo Attallah Salah-El was also an author, scholar and activist who died in a Pennsylvania prison in June 2018, at age 85. He’d served nearly 50 years of a life sentence for a murder he always insisted he did not commit.
Tiyo Attallah Salah-El was also an author, scholar and activist who died in a Pennsylvania prison in June 2018, at age 85. He’d served nearly 50 years of a life sentence for a murder he always insisted he did not commit.
For many years, Lois Ahrens has been pushing to change the nation’s prison system. The Northampton activist, who heads the Real Cost of Prisons Project, has worked with fellow activists, artists, researchers and incarcerated people to try to end.
Letters of life from slow death row
Letters of life from slow death row
February 15, 2021
Inside prison, Tiyo Attallah Salah-El was a jazz musician, writing music and organizing in-prison shows in addition to his work helping fellow prisoners access quality education.
A review of ‘Pen Pal: Prison Letters from a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row’ by Tiyo Attallah Salah-El
by David Gilbert
This inspiring book consists of a selection of 92 of the 568 letters prisoner Tiyo Attallah Salah-El sent out to Paul Alan Smith over the course of 14 years – just one of Tiyo’s richly engaging correspondences. From this book, one can learn a lot about the realities of prison and see a stellar example of a wonderfully productive life despite all kinds of obstacles and feel the passion for social justice.
Joy James, “The New Abolitionists”
Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions. Ruth Wilson Gilmore June Jordan, “Sunflower Sonnet Number Two”
For those who are said to be and become nothing. Build nothing. Think nothing worth repeating or claiming as thought
as such, the commonplace assertion that poetry
makes nothing happen largely attributed, it bears mentioning, to W.H. Auden, himself a poet held in high esteem by more than one shining star within the Black aesthetic tradition simply doesn’t pass muster. Within various sectors of what Amiri Baraka and others have called “the black world,” and, on a much smaller cosmological scale, what we might think of herein as a constellation of sites, subsurface and elsewhere, operating under the general heading of Black America, poetry makes