Jimmy, I'm interested in your literacy narrative, which seems to be so much a part of who you are and how you became a writer--triumph through education and perseverance. Can you talk a little bit about your early years in prison and coming to a love of language there?

I was institutionalized from age five to thirty years, first in an orphanage and then in prison. I kept running away and escaping and escaping and escaping ...I had tried to escape so many times. When I got to prison I refused to work; I wanted to learn--I wanted an education. I was ready to give my life for an education. A man named Jimmy Green taught me poetry. He walked into the library, and they killed him because he wanted to get a book.