Reginald S. Lewis has been held on Death Row in Pennsylvania at SCI Greene since 1983. He is an award winning african american poet, playwright, short story writer, and essayist. He has won three awards in P.E.N. American Center Writing Awards for prisoners. His semi-autobiographical, anti-death penalty play, "An Affinity for Angels," was selected for the 4th Annual Juneteenth Festival of new works, June 17, 2000, at the Actor's Theatre of Louisville. He has also authored two self-published collections of poems titled "Leaving Death Row," and "Inside My Head." This site contains many samples of his writing, detailed information about his legal situation, serves as a repository for his legal defense fund and book sales, and is dedicated to his struggle, hopefully his freedom.

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Selected published writings...

Reading Reginald Sinclair Lewis's recently published collection of essays entitled Where I'm Writing From (Publish America, 2005, ISBN: 1-4137-3674-2) reminds us of the undeniable humanity of every person incarcerated on death row in the United States. Held on Pennsylvania's death row since 1983 for a murder he has always denied having committed, Lewis is an award-winning African-American writer. He has won three P.E.N. American Center Writing Awards for prisoners, and his short play, An Affinity for Angels, was selected for the 4th Annual Juneteenth Festival of new works at the Actor's Theatre of Louisville in 2000. Lewis has also authored two self-published collections of poems entitled Leaving Death Row and Inside My Head.

Where I'm Writing From gives those in the free world a glimpse of the often spiteful shakedowns, seizure of property, and abuse perpetrated by corrections officials working on death row. But it also gives us the chance to meet some of the inmates ? like Willie, who likes to feed the birds, and Freddie, the Hell's Angel with his tall tales about beautiful women. This community includes the now-famous Mumia Abu-Jamal and the recently exonerated Harold Wilson, who spoke to us from the FUMCOG pulpit on Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday this year. Lewis also discusses the cases of a number of fellow inmates whose prior unsatisfactory legal representation begs new consideration for their cases, and he reserves a special compassion for his writings about the women on death row.

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PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY

LET TOOKIE LIVE

By Reginald S. Lewis

The American psyche is battered, bruised, and relentlessly assailed with the pervasive negative media images of prisoners as cold, merciless, murderous beasts filled with hate and misguided rage - and the collective hearts in a once compassionate country, have hardened.

It is very rare to see a positive portrayal of prison inmates in Hollywood, so when the inmates on Pennsylvania's Death Row watched the FX movie Redemption, starring the now Academy Award winning Actor Jamie Foxx, in the role of Death Row inmate, and co-founder of the Los Angeles Crips gang, Stanley "Tookie" Williams, we were riveted to the screens, awe-struck by the cinematic beauty of the powerfully moving movie that captured the essence of the tortured soul and brilliant mind of a black man, whom, while sitting in a small, cramped cell on San Quentin's death row, churned out nine anti-violence books for children and incarcerated adults, for which he was nominagted four times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Williams was also nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize after creating the international peer mentoring program called "The Internet Project for Street Peace." He has singlehandedly brokered peace treaties between rival gangs across the country and beyond, which greatly contributed to the drop in statistics for Murder.

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I first learned about Reggie Lewis through community member Pat Heffron, who has been writing to Reggie for fifteen years now and has visited him on several occasions. Pat would often share some of Reggie's poems with us when he would lead our Friday morning prayer.

As some of you may already know, Reggie Lewis has been confined to Pennsylvania's death row for twenty years now. While imprisoned he has developed a true passion for writing and became a first class poet, essayist, and author of several books.

His latest book is a collection of essays which highlight the injustices of death row, the lives of inmates living there and the court system that sent them there. He makes a clear case to the reader how an innocent person could get caught in a web of racism, falsified evidence, jail-house informants and crooked detectives, and end up sitting on death row waiting to be executed.

Reggie's true talent as an essayist shines in the autobiographical details which makes his writing come to life. In the opening essay, Sweeter than Sugar, Reggie recounts his early childhood growing up in North Philadelphia. He was able to weave in the harsh realities of the urban poor, while at the same time use humor to entertain the audience as he recounts a tale of standing up to a neighborhood bully. Through his writing, I could really see the block he grew up on, and I could smell the scent of alcohol that wafted into his neighborhood storefront church on Sunday mornings from the speakeasy next door.

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September 6th, 2005

Jeffrey A. Beard, Ph.D.

Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections

2520 Lisburn Road, P.O. Box 598

Camp Hill, Pennsylvania 17001-0598

...The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man, and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty...

--Article 1, Section 7, Declaration Of Rights, Constitution of Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Jeffrey A. Beard, Ph.D.;

Respectfully, I am Pennsylvania Death Row inmate Reginald S. Lewis, Number AY2902. In good faith this letter addresses claims that officials at SCI-Graterford, acting in concert with other known or unknown employees in the Central office of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, continue to violate First, Sixth, Eight, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and policy number DC-ADM 803 .Inmate Mail and Incoming Publications,. and DC-ADM 001, including state and federal laws by imposing a "Mail Watch" by illegally copying, logging, monitoring, distributing, and withholding my outgoing and incoming mail in the furtherance of an ongoing conspiracy to disrupt, sabotage, and cut off my communications from the outside world solely because I am a gifted Black American Writer.

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The Chestnut Hill Local is an award-winning, independent weekly newspaper that serves the neighborhood of Chestnut Hill and surrounding communities in the northwest Philadelphia region. They ran the following two part story by Amy Brisson.

PART ONE OF TWO

When poet Reginald Sinclair Lewis was moved to a death watch cell to await his execution in July of 1997, he almost gave up.

"It's cold and lonely being on the death watch, and every day that passed got darker, and I was getting depressed," Lewis told a Local reporter on August 4. "I thought I was gone. They asked me where I wanted my body to be shipped and what size suit I wanted to be buried in. That really shook me."

Lewis, a one-time resident of Mt. Airy, does not seem like the kind of person you expect to meet through a sheet of bullet-proof glass in a super-maximum security prison (Graterford). Lewis is on death row for the murder of a Philadelphia pimp in 1982, although he claims that he was in San Diego, California, at the time.

Read the rest at The Chestnut Hill Local

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The Chestnut Hill Local is an award-winning, independent weekly newspaper that serves the neighborhood of Chestnut Hill and surrounding communities in the northwest Philadelphia region. They ran the following two part story by Amy Brisson.

Second of two parts

On a visit to Pennsylvania's death row, you might not expect to meet an award-winning poet, welterweight boxing champion and former resident of Mt. Airy. But that is just what Reginald Sinclair Lewis is.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Lewis grew up in Philadelphia during the 1960s and 1970s, living with his family in Lower Kensington and with his grandmother in Mount Airy. Although Lewis always loved language, for many years he put his dreams of writing on hold while he became increasingly involved with the dangerous 12th and Oxford Street gang.

A shoot-out put Lewis in Rahway prison for several years, and when he was paroled he tried pursuing both writing and boxing, but began drifting without direction. His discovery of himself as a writer did not come until a few years later, when he found himself again in prison, and this time facing a death sentence.

Read the rest at The Chestnut Hill Local

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I saw the 70's usher in the era of blackploitation flicks such as Superfly, The Mack, Come Back, Charleston Blue, and even slickly packaged Hollywood gangster movies like The Godfather. This was also an era that bred hustlers-turned-authors IceBerg Slim and Donald Goines, and some of the most ruthless true-life gangsters this country has ever seen.

In my hometown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, vicious black street gangs seemingly ruled every inch of the black community, and it was a dangerous time to be a young black teenager living in the treacherous terrain of the urban wilds. My parents did all they could to keep my two older brothers and me from being drafted into the notorious "12th & Oxford Street Gang," one of the largest, fiercest black youth gangs in the history of Philadelphia.

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PENNSYLVANIA-- Long before the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the Patriot Act, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq- and the sickening montage of photographs of Arab prisoners being humiliated and abused by U.S. soldiers shockingly displayed on the front covers of every newspaper in the world- "An order was sent out for body bags," Reginald Sinclair Lewis writes in the essay "A Very Odd Place," from his new book Where I'm Writing From: Essays From Pennsylvania's Death Row (PublishAmerica, LLLP, ISBN: 1-4137-3674-2, $19.95), a collection of 28 essays recorded in a small, cramped cell on Pennsylvania's Death Row- while the author was housed at SCI-Greene, one of the toughest super maximum security prisons in the state, which employed Corporal Charles Garner, the now-convicted central figure in the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

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Four new pieces have been made available on the site.

The first three are poems from "Inside My Head" titled; "3D Visions Behind Glass," "The Migratory Patterns Of Birds," and "For Mynah."

The last is a brand new essay titled "The Pen Behind Bars."

Check them out in the writing section.

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"Inside My Head" was recently voted one of the "Top 15 Non Fiction Books of 2002"!!!

From www.nonfictionreviews.com: Reginald Lewis is a playwright, essayist, and poet who happens to be living on Death Row. Inside My Head, his book of 69 poems, are painful vignettes that depict life for poor men - mostly black - behind prison walls. Those prison walls may or may not be actual walls of brick and concrete. Sometimes they are the prison of poverty, ignorance, and the myths caused by racism and media brainwashing. Very powerful.

See the rest of the review at www.nonfictionreviews.com.

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I am Reginald S. Lewis, a widely-published, award-winning, African American poet, essayist, and playwright.

I'm the author of two self-published collections of poetry entitled "Leaving Death Row," and my new book, "Inside My Head," is now out.

I've been a resident of Pennsylvania's death row for almost twenty long, harrowing years, for the stabbing death of a 250lb man in a seedy drug bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And if you can believe the prosecutions' witnesses - several of whom had long criminal records - the motive for this crime stemmed from a heated argument over a ridiculously small debt the victim allegedly owed the perpetrator. This is a deeply painful lie.

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In this book of 69 poems, divided into four chapters, I wanted to burrow deep into my soul, through a process of the self-examination of my masculine psyche, my political consciousness and world views--shaped and mortised by my almost two decades long confinement on Pennsylvania's Death Row. The reader is given a front seat on a fast-moving train fleeting through the disconcerted lives of the women in Afghanistan, Death Row, a misguided young black juvenile's dreams, a frustrated would-be actress driven to murder, a bi-racial teen's suicide, my own crack-addicted sister's tortured life--and the tragic events of September 11, 2001, which shocked the consciousness of the nation and the world. Inside My Head is not just another glimpse of the topography of my mind--but raw testimony for readers far beyond these prison walls.

"Reginald S. Lewis' voice is clear, powerful, puncturing through the illusions that all too many of us live in to show us the reality that over two million and growing deal with every day. His power comes from the truth."

--Walidah Imarisha, Award-winning Slam Poet.

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It is a sickening montage of horrific dreams reeling through the minds of men and women on death rows across the nation. A meticulously rehearsed scene from a staged Shakespearean drama, haunting, stalking, every minute of our existence -- so when the fraternity of grim-faced, black-booted guards suddenly swept into my cell, I willed myself to a dead calm.

A tall, blond haired Lieutenant stepped forward and clamped a pair of heavy handcuffs tightly around my wrists. "Do you know where you're going, Lewis?" he asked in a cold, but professional thunder.

I looked at his white shirt and replied, "No, Sir."

"Phase II," he said. "Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge has signed your death warrant. Your execution is scheduled for July 15, 1997. Let's go."

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The front page of the November 24, 1997 Pennsylvania Legal Intelligencer glowed with the intensity of a huge neon sign atop New York's Times Square:

SABO OUT AS SR. JUDGE, 5 NEW TEAM LEADERS IN...

For the 32 defendants who left his dungeon-like courtroom with death sentences -- twenty of whom still languish on death row, (this writer among them) it was a day before "Thanksgiving" and we were served a fat, juicy, turkey pumped on steroids. Santa had come early. It was New Year's Rockin' Eve.

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