Words Is a Powerful Thing

"Anyone who reads this book will be inspired by [Daldorph’s] two decades of experience and his stories of the transformational powers of art."—Kansas History

“I get a lot of prisoner anthologies from all over the world and at times they seem to blend together—some are okay, others worthy of serious reflection, and a few reach higher to demand reading and studious thoughtfulness. And then there are those few warrior-spirit poets and fiction writers that cancel my boredom and fatigue and awaken my senses to a higher attention as the pages seem to leap up and grasp me by my shirt collar. This is one of those anthologies; this is one of those books that diminishes all noise baffling us from academics and professors and justice officials writing about prison. These are the voices who know; these are the voices who have been there and have come back with the news that prison will never work, that keeping human beings in cages will never, ever be the solution.”—Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Place to Stand and Laughing in the Light

“‘Writing was water that cleansed the wound and fed the parched root of my heart,’ Jimmy Santiago Baca wrote in his prison memoir Working in the Dark. Brian Daldorph shows that words are the water that cleans and revitalizes the lives of inmates he has worked with for over twenty years as a writing class instructor at Douglas County Jail in Lawrence, Kansas.”—Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of Dead Man Walking, The Death of Innocents, and River of Fire

“Brian Daldorph and his fellow writers have given us a gift. It is not just a collection of creative work, or one teacher’s personal reflection. Like poetry itself, this book is words transformed into energy and power. Its pages hum with an electricity that can only come from the synergy between the many truths of incarcerated writers and the complex worlds that they inhabit.”—Christopher P. Dum, cofounder of the ID13 Prison Literacy Project and author of Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel

“Daldorph empowers his incarcerated students; his powerful book lets us hear their humanity in their own words and in Daldorph’s portrayals of them. As the incarcerated writers investigate their lives, readers do their own investigations and make discoveries about their own humanity. Indeed, the book shows us that those on the ‘outside’ benefit by spending time with those on the ‘inside,’ either in person or on the page.”—Jayne Thompson, assistant teaching professor of English, Widener University, and coeditor of Letters to My Younger Self: An Anthology of Writings by Incarcerated Men at S.C.I. Graterford and a Writing Workbook

“Brian Daldorph’s Words Is a Powerful Thing takes readers into a foreboding place—through the electronic doors and cement hallways of the county jail in Lawrence, Kansas—and reveals something unexpected: the intense possibility of beauty and art and poetry behind bars. Daldorph examines how poetry can push students clad in matching anonymous jail-cell jumpsuits toward a greater understanding of truth and hope and selfhood. Words Is a Powerful Thing is a tremendous memoir of Daldorph’s fifteen-plus years teaching at the jail but also an intimate look at his students, their poetry, and the human cost of America’s carceral system.”—Daniel A. Hoyt, author of This Book Is Not for You