Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an
American Prison by Shaka Senghor
Shaka Senghor is a member of Oprah’s Super Soul 100, a group
of 100 leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity
(website). He is also a convicted
murderer who plead guilty to second-degree murder and served nineteen years in
prison, seven of those years in solitary confinement. Senghor grew up in a neighborhood on Detroit’s
east side during the 1980’s. He was a
good student who had good grades and ambitions, wanting to become a
doctor. Just before he became a teenager,
his parents’ marriage dissolved and the abuse from his mother increased;
Senghor ran away from home and began dealing and taking drugs to stay alive,
and was shot three times on a street corner in his neighborhood, but no one
offered him any help or any hope. By age
nineteen, he was imprisoned for murder, angry with himself and his world, both
of which had let him down. In prison, after
becoming the “worst of the worst” Senghor spent time in solitary confinement,
but something unexpected happened there: after a letter from his young son, he rediscovered
his passion for learning and his gift for journaling and storytelling and most
of all: Hope. He read everything he could
from the prison library, began meditating and journaling to learn more about
himself and to learn to forgive himself, and ask the same of others, for the
wrongs he had committed. Upon his
release from prison, not quite forty-years-old, Senghor vowed to continue his
work of self-discovery and became an activist, writer and speaker to help mentor
young men and women who might find themselves in similar situations to his own,
and help them find a different way out. Senghor’s
story is not an easy one to read about, but there is something in his story
that offers hope for his future and for the future of others in this raw and honest memoir. Senghor is a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and
Kellogg Foundation and has spoken at TED.
FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for
this review.
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