Pen Pal: Prison Letters from a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row

Tiyo Attallah Salah-El died in 2018 on Slow Death Row while serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. Tiyo was initially in correspondence with the renowned historian Howard Zinn (author of A People’s History of the United States) who introduced Tiyo to his agent Paul Allan Smith. Tiyo’s letters to Paul have been compiled in this book. Despite the tribulations of incarceration, Tiyo’s dispatches are humorous, philosophical and poetic. At a time when the appalling racial bias of America’s police and criminal justice system is under the spotlight as never before, Pen Pal is both a vital intervention and moving portrait of someone whose physical confinement could never extinguish an extraordinary free spirit.

Tiyo was an author, scholar, teacher, musician, and activist. He was the founder of the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons.