In 2013, I spent a week at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola. The photographer Deborah Luster and I were on assignment to document The Life of Jesus Christ, a passion play that was being performed by men incarcerated there as well as by a group of women incarcerated at the nearby prison in St. Gabriel. Luster and I both have a parent who was murdered—both murders were contract killings in Phoenix, Arizona—and I expected to write about this fact and something redemptive about the Christ story as depicted by these actors, many of whom were serving life sent ences for violent crimes. But over the course of that week of long, unsupervised conversations, I began to feel I had more in common with some of the incarcerated people I spoke to than I did with many people I knew in the free world. Despite our other differences, we all had firsthand knowledge of violent crime and its consequences. Many of them were philosophically and spiritually inclined in ways I identified with.

Quntos KunQuest was part of the sound crew for the play and also wrote some music for it. He had zero desire to talk to me at first, but once we started talking it became clear to both of us that we have the same brain shape. KunQuest wanted to write stadium songs, he told me that first day, songs for a huge crowd, which he likened to building an outfit around a pair of shoes or a necklace, a simple central concept as the focal point of a larger composition. Eventually, we started talking about books. He had been reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, and he believed that most people don’t appreciate its depths; they just rush toward the superficial points without appreciating the nuances or the development. And, as KunQuest said, “What you do small, you do large.”

KunQuest and I started corresponding by mail—the same method we used to conduct this interview. At some point, I mentioned I was trying to write a novel about a man ser ving life at Angola, and he told me he had written a novel like that himself. The manuscript was handwritten in ballpoint pen (KunQuest had transcribed a new copy of the novel for me, all 343 pages of it), and it arrived in my mailbox in November of 2015, almost twenty years into his sentence. The action centered around the relationship between Lil Chris, a new arrival, and Rise, who has been in prison for many years, their story interspersed with vivid set pieces describing daily life at Angola, written in many registers, from the African American slang of the dialogue to the rich mix of formal and colloquial English of the narration to rap lyrics. It was dramatic, elegant, and funny—funny in a way only possible for someone who in real life has maintained his sense of humor and joie de vivre two and a half decades into a life sentence for a $300 carjacking. Six years later, KunQuest’s debut novel, This Life, is finally going out into the wider world.

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