Pen Pal
Prison Letters from a Free Spirit on Slow Death Row
Tiyo Attallah Salah-El died in 2018 on “Slow Death Row” while serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. Tiyo was initially in correspondence with the renowned historian Howard Zinn (author of A People's History of the United States) who introduced Tiyo to his agent Paul Allan Smith. Tiyo's letters to Paul have been compiled in this book. Despite the tribulations of incarceration, Tiyo's dispatches are humorous, philosophical and poetic. At a time when the appalling racial bias of America’s police and criminal justice system is under the spotlight as never before, Pen Pal is both a vital intervention and moving portrait of someone whose physical confinement could never extinguish an extraordinary free spirit.
Tiyo was an author, scholar, teacher, musician, and activist. He was the founder of the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons.
Tiyo Attallah Salah-El served a life sentence, primarily in the State Correctional Institute at Dallas in Pennsylvania. He was the founder of the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons, the author of an autobiography, and a teacher of law and GED classes in prison. He died in prison in 2018. His papers are archived at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
