AS THE editor in chief of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, an annual literary magazine supported by Fairfield University in Connecticut, I spend a lot of time staring at submissions. Most come through an online submission manager, but every summer during our submissions period we receive ten or twenty postal mail submissions. These typically come from writers who, for reasons of disability or challenges with technology, find it easier to send their writing this way. Each year among the poems, stories, drawings, and other material sent by post, the journal typically receives one or two envelopes with a correctional institution stamped as the return address.
In the fall of 2021, I opened one such envelope from my campus mailbox and pulled out a packet of pages that had been typed on a manual typewriter. I read the first page of the short fiction piece, which passed my basic test: I fell into the narrative and immediately forgot I was reading to screen submissions. The story, “The Pinch-Hitter” by Sam Jenkins, was about a left-handed baseball player named Archie “Mudcat” Hawkins, and it was alive with detail, beautiful dialogue, and a resonant physical and emotional world. I kept reading, and I knew after a few pages that I wanted to publish it in the journal. I flipped back in the packet to the cover letter in which Jenkins said he didn’t have access to a computer. How exactly would our editorial exchange work?
In the years leading up to my interest in Jenkins’s story, I had been learning about the prison-industrial complex. I began educating myself by attending protests, reading social media posts, and going to memorials for local and national victims of police violence after the murder of Trayvonfinding housing or employment, they are often forced to live on the streets. I got to know many of these veterans deeply, and I was struck by how their incarceration so often stemmed from these complex problems.
