An Innocent in the House of the Dead by Joanna Catherine Scott
Publisher: Main Street Rag
ISBN: 978-1-59948-318-4
Price: $14 ($12 when purchased from the MSR Online Bookstore)
Ordering Information: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/JCScott_2.html
Joanna Catherine Scott is the author of the prizewinning poetry collections Breakfast at the Shangri-la, Fainting at the Uffizi, and Night Huntress; the prizewinning chapbooks Birth Mother and Coming Down from Bataan; the novels Child of the South, The Road from Chapel Hill, The Lucky Gourd Shop, Charlie, and Cassandra, Lost; and the nonfiction Indochina's Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. A Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, Scott is a graduate of Adelaide and Duke Universities and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her website is
www.joannacatherinescott.com.
John Lee Conaway was born fatherless in Rockingham, North Carolina. When he was two years old he moved to Washington, D.C., with his mother. He lived there until the age of six, then moved to Cambridge, Maryland. His life with the justice system started with this move. He spent sixteen years on Death Row in North Carolina before a federal court granted him a writ of habeas corpus, and is currently seeking a new lawyer who will help him prove his innocence. John educated himself with the help of other inmates on death row, an NCSU professor and a nun from Michigan, both of whom were perceptive enough to see in him a diamond in the rough. His short memoir Break-Out was published in J Journal: New Writing On Justice, and editorialized as the most poignant story in that issue. An excerpt can be accessed here.
Comments
This latest volume of Scott’s poetry is reminiscent of Adrienne Rich's work in its deep concern with social issues. Here she treats with insight, beauty, and power the ugly subjects of capital punishment and incarceration, and the inattention and lack of opportunity that beget them. In "On Constancy" and "Mail Call on the Cell Block" she tenderly elucidates the importance of "being there" for those who have so often been ignored, disappointed, and abandoned.
—Nancy Black Segafi-nejad,
author of Friends at the Bar: A Quaker View of Law,
Conflict Resolution, and Legal Reform
Only Joanna Catherine Scott's heart is larger than her skills: Two years I had been locked up / in the hole, / and the space alarmed me, / the unruly light. May Scott's latest book wake you to the criminal treatment we serve to the United State's least fortunate citizens."
--Carol Peters, author of Sixty Some
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