There are two versions of my dream.
The first was born in solitary confinement, when I wrote my first book and imagined a life that, at the time, felt almost impossible to claim. That dream was fiction. It was always fiction. It was the dream of creating worlds out of nothing but language, memory, instinct, imagination, and nerve. It was the dream of writing stories so alive they could leap off the page and find their way into film, television, and the stage. That was the first dream. The truest dream. The one that has been burning in me for more than twenty-six years.
Then there is the second dream.
That dream took shape in real time. It came as a result of my writing, but not in the way I first imagined. When I wrote Writing My Wrongs, part of what drove me was the realization that people did not fully understand how somebody who came from where I came from could speak the way I speak, write the way I write, or imagine a future bigger than prison. That book opened another world for me. It gave me a chance to make a life from the things I care most deeply about: telling the truth about the world I came from, writing about it, speaking about it, helping people find their own way through pain, adversity, and transformation.
That second dream has been meaningful beyond words. It has changed my life. It has opened doors I could not have imagined. It has allowed me to make a living doing work I believe in. It has given birth to opportunities, relationships, impact, and a body of work that I am deeply proud of.
But the complexity is this: those two dreams are intertwined, yet they are not the same.
From the outside, it can all look linear. It can look like one beautiful, continuous dream fulfilled. A man writes, the world responds, and the story becomes one of triumph. But that is not the whole truth. The deeper truth is that while I have been blessed to live the second dream, the first dream has never stopped calling me.
It has always been there, running in the background.
When will my turn come? When will I get to do the thing I truly love in the fullest way? When will I get to share the stories that arise not just from what I have survived, but from the deepest workings of my imagination? Not just stories told by a formerly incarcerated man who became a writer, but stories told by an artist. A creator. A builder of worlds. A man who has spent decades honoring the audacity it took to dream in an environment designed for nightmares.
That is the tension that has hovered over my life for twenty-six years.
I want to write fictional worlds that carry the full range of my mind and creativity. I want to shape characters, desires, tensions, and possibilities that did not exist until I called them into being. I want to play with the beauty, power, majesty, and mystery of language. I want to create stories that move from page to screenplay, from screenplay to stage, from stage to screen, and into theaters, living rooms, and hearts. I want my fiction to live in the world in a way that honors the emotional and spiritual investment it took to keep that dream alive.
And I say that without diminishing anything that has happened in the last fifteen years.
I am proud of this life. Proud of the books. Proud of the talks. Proud of the impact. Proud of every extraordinary thing that grew from the work I have done. I am in awe of what writing has made possible for me.
But I am also at a point in my life where I can say clearly: the fulfillment of my purpose is not complete until I honor what is truest in my spirit.
And what is truest in my spirit is this:
I was born to live as an artist.
I was born to imagine worlds and bring them to life.
I was born to do the work that first called my name when nobody knew who I was.
That dream burns as bright today as it did twenty-six years ago. Maybe brighter. And I believe now, more than ever, that it is within reach.
For most of my life, I have done what I had to do so I could survive. Then I did what I had to do so I could build a life. Now I am fighting for the space, the freedom, and the courage to do what I was always meant to do.
That is the chapter I want to live now.
Not in denial of everything that came before, but in full alignment with the deepest truth of who I am.