Editor's note: This story was updated on January 8, 2024, to reflect certain corrections.
By 2014, George T. Wilkerson had been living on North Carolina’s death row for seven years. His long and empty days were spent shuffling from his cell to the dayroom and back again, never knowing when he might be booked for execution. He was feeling despair and regret, isolation and helplessness—emotions he couldn’t easily understand or express. Easier just to go numb. But when he heard about an upcoming creative writing class led by a local writer, he was intrigued. “I was surprised they were running it,” says Wilkerson, who was convicted of a double murder in 2006. “Usually it’s like, ‘you’re here to be executed—not to write.’” And although he had no knowledge of literature, he signed up straightaway.
In the class, Writing from Captivity, the inmates learned about the powerful texts that had been penned from prison, including Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and parts of the New Testament. Then the instructor invited the men to craft poems and short stories—something Wilkerson had never done before. One of the tasks? Make a poem out of a big pile of word cards.
“The instructor dumped the bag of words on the table, and she said we had 10 minutes to make a poem,” Wilkerson says. Time was running out as he struggled to find a word that meant sadness. “But then I had an Aha! moment,” he says. “I realized all the cards were blue, and blue can mean sad. I turned a card face down, and I put it in my poem.”
From that moment on, Wilkerson was into poetry. “I saw it’s a different way of thinking,” he says, “using a different part of your brain.” But he knew he had a lot to learn about the craft. “Falling in love with poetry didn’t make me a good poet,” he says. “I had to build that plane as I flew it.”
Wilkerson, who is also the editor of Compassion, a newsletter distributed to the 2,300 or so prisoners on death row in this country as well as to each justice on the US Supreme Court, went on to win awards for his writing. He always wondered, though, if publishers might be interested in collecting some of his poems into a book. He hoped to share his writing with the world outside, “to show the human experience of incarceration,” he says.
He found a publishing house that was interested in putting out a book, but when they discovered he had been convicted of murder, they turned him down. Wilkerson, who believes he has repented for his crimes and feels like a changed man, was disappointed. But then, in 2020, he met Robert Johnson.
A professor in AU’s Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology who has taught in the School of Public Affairs since 1977, Johnson heard a friend speak highly of Wilkerson’s work. He looked at a few poems, and immediately realized their quality—as emotional as they were straightforwardly informal and suffused with vivid imagery. “George writes like he talks,” Johnson says. “That's very hard for people to do.”
Speaking on the phone, Johnson made Wilkerson an offer. He wanted to publish a book of Wilkerson’s poetry with BleakHouse Publishing, a press that, since 2006, he has run with AU student volunteers. Wilkerson was gratified. He had never expected to be approached by a publisher, and especially not on death row—a place designed to cut people off from the outside world and where writers usually struggled to be heard. What, he wondered, could be driving Johnson to seek out writers in prison?
Johnson is an expert on imprisonment in America. He has testified in numerous cases before US state and federal courts, including in many death penalty cases. He has published more than 50 articles. In his work shining a light on the justice system’s wrongs, statistics and other quantitative data are vital. Numbers can help prove the existence of discrimination or that a prison is unsafe. But for uncovering how a human being experiences the isolating and painful experience of a prison sentence without end, there is nothing better, Johnson believes, than creative writing. Literature, says Johnson—who is himself a poet and fiction writer—is an essential resource “for understanding how people experience their incarceration. It’s an insider’s voice on how the system works.”
By 2006, though, Johnson was tired of struggling to find easily available, high-quality poems, stories, essays, or memoirs written by incarcerated people. But then he had an idea.
Why not start a press dedicated to publishing work by writers with both direct and indirect experiences of incarceration—those inside the prison’s walls and those on the outside looking in? It could even publish the literary works of his students, who, he imagined, might be interested in volunteering to help run the press. Costs would be kept low, and he could connect the press to an annual literary journal, Tacenda Magazine, that he had recently started to edit.
That year, BleakHouse Publishing was born—with Johnson naming the press after the Dickens novel about a labyrinthine legal case that rolls on for decades, knowing that many of the writers he would publish would find themselves in similarly interminable administrative torments. But Johnson knew that he could not run the whole project by himself. So he went looking for eager students interested in lending a hand.
He found one in Sonia Tabriz, CAS-SPA/BA ’10. In her first semester at AU, Tabriz, an undergraduate in Johnson’s class, went on a tour of a Baltimore prison. What she witnessed there was difficult to comprehend and she wrote a poem about her experience. Johnson published the poem in Tacenda. From then on, Tabriz started helping with BleakHouse.
In the evenings after finishing her classes, Tabriz would walk to Johnson’s booklined office in Kerwin Hall. Johnson, Tabriz, and a few other student volunteers would order pizza and sift through submissions. They’d edit collections of poetry and work on the website. And they’d discuss topics like juvenile justice reform, the death penalty, and life without parole.
Her BleakHouse days were “a total dream,” says Tabriz—who is now a partner at the multinational law firm Arnold and Porter, where she maintains an active pro bono practice. To work at BleakHouse, Tabriz felt, was to help humanize people. And Johnson allowed her and her fellow student volunteers to feel ownership over the work.
Johnson, who has long been dedicated to mentoring students, “is the best of humanity,” Tabriz says. “He has this extraordinary and deeply earnest way of making everyone feel important. Rob believes that everyone deserves an opportunity to be heard. And that extends beyond campus, to individuals who are incarcerated.”
Johnson and Tabriz went on to edit Life Without Parole: Living and Dying in Prison Today, a collection of writings by Victor Hassine, who died while serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania in 2008. The book was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. They collaborated on law review articles about juvenile justice reform. And they coedited Lethal Rejection: Stories on Crime and Punishment, published by Carolina Academic Press, also in 2010, which featured fiction by prisoners and AU students.
BleakHouse has now published 15 books, including two volumes by Wilkerson. For many writers Johnson has published, the press has been a lifeline—a means of connecting them with the outside world, while providing them with an outlet for creativity, which the prison environment can stifle.
“In prison there’s an expression: jail face,” says Charles Huckelbury, a BleakHouse writer, which means you are expressionless for your own protection.
“If you let somebody know you enjoy something,” says Huckelbury, who was paroled from a life sentence in 2012 and is a columnist for the Concord Monitor, “they will take it from you. And if you let somebody know you don’t like something, they will do it again. Writing relieves the burden of having to do that. You can be real, and you can have an outlet. It’s a feeling of being free, at least in the metaphorical sense.”
For Wilkerson, holding in his hands a book he had written was beyond anything he had ever expected. “Even if I wasn't incarcerated, it would mean a lot to be published,” he says. “But the fact Rob’s still willing to work with me and I'm incarcerated—well, it means the world to me.” But the purpose of BleakHouse is not to do its writers a favor. As Huckelbury sees it, the press performs a vital public service, helping readers appreciate the largely untapped potential of America’s vast prison population.
“Granted,” he says, “the crimes that some have committed make it tough to see the human inside. But the writing BleakHouse publishes shows that many of these people do have potential. That they don’t belong in a cage for the rest of their lives, and they don’t need to be put to death.”
In publishing writers who have been convicted of some the gravest offenses, though, Johnson does not wish to diminish their wrongdoings. “I don’t want to lose sight of the seriousness of crime,” he says—adding that among those serving sentences, including on death row, there will always be innocent people. “We need to understand how somebody becomes capable of committing a terrible crime. And then, to understand how they live out the experience of an extreme punishment, whether that’s a life sentence or a death sentence.”
The educational value of reading work by incarcerated people is brought to life in Johnson’s classes. Bone Orchard is a book-length portrayal of everyday life on death row, coauthored by Johnson and Wilkerson, which was published by BleakHouse last year. Johnson uses the book in his seminar, Harsh Justice, to illustrate the human realities of the death penalty—and students are gripped. “Getting to read a first-hand perspective of being on death row was really insightful,” says Norah Nasser, SPA/BA ’25, “and something that I genuinely hadn’t seen before.”
This year, Nasser, fascinated by what she’d heard in Johnson’s class, told him she’d like to lend a hand with the press—which, today, is as busy as it’s ever been. Nasser, now BleakHouse’s chief operating officer, works with three other AU students, along with graduate students in the English department at the University of North Alabama (UNA), and the press’ new editor in chief, Katie Owens-Murphy, a UNA English professor. The team is working on a forthcoming poetry collection by Phillip Vance Smith III, a writer serving life without parole in North Carolina, and there is a new issue of Tacenda to put together.
The new team, Johnson says, is especially motivated to spread the word about great writing. Their aim is to get more books into the hands of more people, and they have begun to use social media to connect with potential readers—the start of a new chapter for a press that, Johnson admits, has relied solely on word-of-mouth publicity for too long. “If you want a prediction,” says Johnson, BleakHouse and Tacenda “are going to blossom for the next couple of years.”
These days, on death row, Wilkerson spends at least three hours a day reading and writing. “It’s what keeps me going,” he says. With poetry, he now has a potent tool to explore his feelings, as well as to record and share his day-to-day life with his readers. “I put in a lot of work to raise the quality of my writing,” he says. “I feel I have a responsibility to help represent the experiences of other people here. Telling my story is also sharing their stories.”