An Interview With Jimmy Santiago Baca

On Writing, Prison, and The Human Spirit

But you can’t look to the institutions of learning for the moral way of living. You have to look at those people that mix pluses and minuses together to get some weird, weird formula. And that’s exactly how I try to live. I try to mix the moon with the sun, and the stars with the water. And I try to come up with a new universe.

Facing Cancer

“Peg has left us. She died peacefully. . . .”

There seems to be more of me in this letter than I like. However, I want you to know that, though tired, I am peacefully sad yet thankful that Peg’s pain is over.

Excerpts From Peg Staley’s Letters

I’m not even going to try to sort out how I can be the source of my universe and at the same time know that God holds me eternally in love. I just know both things are true. And in this Easter season I am deeply moved by the events in the Bible and their parallel in my life. Christ’s willingness to experience humanity as I do seems especially precious. And I have history and knowledge on my side as I go through the events of Holy week, knowing that Easter will come. Death itself cannot obliterate me.

There But For The God Of Grace Go I

He decided that if looking into the darkness could evoke both bears with frying pans and wonderful fantasy worlds, then it was all a matter of the manner in which he went about looking that determined what would confront him. He was still scared of the dark so he limited his looking to moments of strong neurotic necessity, but the vision had been so powerful he never again seriously considered brick and mortar as being in any way, shape or form representational of reality.

Photographs By Barbara Docktor

The photographs in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Joe

Selected Poems

The Horses