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Archive Catalog

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Authors

Darrell W. Maness

George Wilkerson

Rodney Taylor, Sr.

Collections

Call & Response

Call & Response: The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead

General submissions

Speaking of faith

Date

Title

#98 ‘Tough on crime’ policies endanger the public

#105 A bucket of chicken

#37 A message for Mothers’ Day

#3 All that matters

#80 Amazing grace

#78 Anti-Catholic sentiment as public safety

#14 At the zoo, on display

#91 Beyond the wall (part 1)

#92 Beyond the wall (part 2)

#6 Blood on my sleeves

#101 Breaking news

#13 Breaking the silence

#69 Bringing in the new year

#24 Caged canaries

#103 Carrying my side of the plexiglass

#75 Contradictions

#102 Conversation with a dear friend

#67 Dance to the flame

#96 Demons in the grave

#76 Do you love your friends?

#63 Domesticated

#79 Down in the river to pray

#84 Easy doesn’t come easy

#60 Fear of acceptance

#26 Fine dining in prison

#77 For freedom

#17 Give me a sign

#25 Hanging in the jar life

#32 Highrise, part one

#33 Highrise, part two

#97 How do you see yourself

#81 How great thou art

#72 Hypertension

#89 In your eyes

#94 Insane world

#48 Inside of outside

#64 Invest in rehabilitation, not punishment

#99 Judicial pantomime

#41 Learning process

#62 Leaving Eden

#52 Marching orders

#23 Me and mine

#18 O Christmas tree

#38 One quiet breath

#28 Pantoum of the forgotten prisoner

#43 Pawn sacrifice

#44 Potential to evolve

#10 Prison is time

#83 Reality check

#90 Refusing to die

#61 Small windows

#95 Sorry that I let you down

#104 Story of mine

#86 Supervision failures

#85 Synthesizing freedom

#74 Talking to my mom in autumn

#21 Talking to myself

#2 Ten cent a minute

#54 The darkness of nights past

#34 The elephant in the room

#66 The gift of song

#53 The great American eclipse 2017

#58 The last lifeline

#68 The longest night

#45 The noisy blanket

#57 The right to remain silent

#100 The timestretcher

#88 The weather

#31 They took my baby away

#20 Three Shifts of an Eleventh Hour

#51 Through the fog

#56 To shine, beat the sun up

#9 Twenty years

#8 Undead: voices from the grave

#59 When I look

#93 When killers cry

#71 When You Look at Me

#65 Where does it end?

#70 You Have No Idea

Tags

Solitary confinement

Throw-away culture

Generational trauma

Mass incarceration

Domestic violence

Generational incarceration

Popular culture

Police violence

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#90 Refusing to die

Every breath fueled by the underground heartbeat lets a hip hop head know he’s still alive.

Leroy Mann2018/06/03

Notes

At turns a history of Hip Hop, at others an autobiographical ode to the music that “let [this] hip hop head know he’s still alive,” Leroy Mann’s newest piece, “Refusing to die,” is an incisive review of J. Cole’s newest album “KOD.”

With this review, Mann charts new territory for the Life Lines Collective, and he does so with the wit, intellect, and style typical of his work. Mann has had his eyes on Cole for sometime, and though Mann laments the barriers the prison system places between him and the music he loves — “In this modern era of digital downloads,” he writes, “adjusting the dial on [my prison issue AM/FM radio] is like seeking freedom with diligence, only to find out that you’ve been running within the parameters of the plantation the whole time” — he’s drawn together the fragments of Cole’s album available to him into a commentary that is truly illuminating.

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