Walidah Imarisha - Angels with Dirty Faces

Walidah Imarisha has written a brave book. It demonstrates both the universality and distinctiveness of three lives enmeshed through the US prison system. Imarisha pushes us to give up easy distinctions between innocence and guilt, good and evil, and to experience punishment and imprisonment as the messy, complex systems they are. And she reminds us that, while there are no winners in this game, it is one replete with compassion, care, and resistance enough to permeate walls a nd cages.

Rach el Herzing

Some authors approach the subject of incarceration from a great distance, but with Angels with Dirty Faces , author/activist Walidah Imarisha goes as deep as any writer can without actually serving time. The result is a highly personalized and intimate portrait by a courageous writer who goes beyond clichs and platitudes. This book is a bracing, clear-eyed exploration of one of the most important issues of our time: the growing incarceration rate in the U.S., and the consequences of this for citizens both inside and outside pris on walls.

T.J. English, New York Times best-selling author of Where the Bodies Were Buried and T he Westies

Angels with Dirty Faces is a powerful exploration of Americas prison nation. Using three disparate yet interconnected stories, including her own, Walidah Imarisha gives us an unvarnished take on prison abolition. Beyond slogans or strategy, we are left with people, in all our imperfections and possibilities. This is a bold, beautiful, and absolutely necessary book, told with urgency and passion.

Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

We live in a violent state, run by a violent economic trap, that a violent prison system perpetuates and hides. The reality of violence in the US is so pervasive that the state has all the mirrors in the house covered up. Angels with Dirty Faces is a memoir of a reality so crucial and transformative that the state is desperate to keep it locked out of our collective consciousness. And yet w e live it.

Here, Imarisha is doing the work that we all must do if we are going to have the world we deserve. She is looking deeply at the violence of prisons and the lives and impact of people who have engaged in violent acts with a love that never stops believing that we are more than the violence that structures our days. There is hope, love, and honesty here. And a model for the conversations we need to have right now, right here in hell.

Alexis Pau line Gumbs

Walidah Imarisha relates the experiences of crime, punishment, and victimization, not as abstractions, but as lived human tragedies. She shows us how they diminish and distortbut never definethe lives of those who suffer them. Writing with sorrow, and anger, and courageous hope, she forces us to reconsider what we mean by justice, and by what endeavors its cause might be advanced, if never finally achieved.

Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

A brave, honest search for answers regarding incar ceration.

Kirk us Reviews

Angels with Dirty Faces is actually three biographies in one, a triography so to speak, of the lives of Mac, Kakamia, and Walidah converging at a California prison. In the beginning they all thought they would just be telling a story... until they made the decision to tell t he truth.

Angels with Dirty Faces is a superbly written, shocking, sensuous, sometimes sadistic and even scandalous binding of biographies struggling with the question: What does redemption actually mean? It is impossible for one to engage this work and not emerge on the other side profoundly affected.

Sundi ata Acoli

I read Angels With Dirty Faces in one sitting, mesmerized by what Walidah Imarisha has accomplished: a daring dive into the real deal about why prisons dont work, filled with love for hustlers, rebels. and the criminalized, imperfect survivors that the prison-industrial complex locks up. Written in such lyrical, fierce poetry it takes your bre ath away.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming He r Way Home