Posts on Criminal Justice and Prison Reform

Some mysteries are buried deep, but they never truly disappear. For the past year, I’ve been immersed in the cold, hard details of a case that’s haunted me since I first started researching it three decades ago. Bringing The Jacklighter to life has been an exercise in reconstruction—sifting through old boxes of evidence, documents, and now ...

As part of my “Author’s Cut” re-boot of Chained Birds, I am making available to the public the video surveillance footage of the 2011 recreational cage fight at Lewisburg Prison that essentially launched this book. It’s grainy and brutal, and thankfully the victim survived and walked away on his own … still, viewer discretion ...

This is the second of two prison stabbing videos I’ve made available to the public as part of my re-launch of Chained Birds: A Crimemoir. Like the first one, it’s grainy and brutal, and the victim—federal inmate Kevin Sanders—survives … but just barely. The 2013 footage from USP Florence in Colorado begins with an Aryan ...

I’m thrilled to announce that Chained Birds has been recognized as a True Crime finalist in the 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards! Thank you, NIEA, for this literary honor and for adding to my Spring collection of True Crime awards! 🌸📚🏆 The NIEA is a prestigious program that celebrates independent publishing across a wide variety of ...

In this whirlwind year of a book launch, conferences, and awards, I’m trying to appreciate each milestone, and that includes a new author interview posted by IndieReader Discovery Awards, which named Chained Birds its 2025 True Crime category winner. I was delighted when IndieReader reached out for the interview, and told editor Amy Edelman that I ...

One of the key benefits of attending writers’ conferences is the people you meet, and this interview with a fellow author and blogger is a lovely example of one of those spinoffs. I had the great pleasure of meeting Christina Boyd at the April Chanticleer Authors’ Conference in Bellingham, Wash., where we both won book awards. ...

Drumroll please … introducing my very first (and possibly only, ever) handcrafted book trailer for CHAINED BIRDS: A True Crime Memoir. (Note this book was retitled Chained Birds: A Crimemoir during my summer 2025 re-launch under my own imprint.) This labor of love was requested by the Next Generation Indie Book Awards for their upcoming ...

Oh, how I love my indie book award programs! Chained Birds has won another True Crime literary honor, this time taking the 2025 True Crime top prize in the Indie Reader Discovery Awards, announced today. I’m not sharing this award with anyone, and there are no True Crime finalists to congratulate — it’s just little ...

I just got the wonderful news that Chained Birds: A True-Crime Memoir captured the Silver Medal in the True Crime category of the 2025 Independent Publisher Book Awards, aka the IPPY awards! 🎉 This is the second true crime book award for Chained Birds this month 😭😭😭 I’d like to congratulate all the IPPY winners in ...