“We All Have An Expiration Date”: The Death of a Prison Writer

Last November, my wife Emily opened two envelopes from Timothy Bazrowx, both addressed in a courier font we now associate with prisons, among the last places on earth where everyone uses a typewriter. Bazrowx was submitting an essay and short story to The Insider Prize, a contest for incarcerated writers in Texas, which we run for the magazine American Short Fiction. He had submitted unsuccessfully the year before. But this year, his essay “When Ponies Rule”—which vividly described the rice farm where he grew up—earned a spot as a finalist. This weekend, I planned to write a letter telling him.

Bazrowx wrote constantly to an array of pen pals, including a lawyer and journalist, but around mid-April the letters abruptly stopped.

At least 218 people of COVID-19 in prisons and jails around the country. The same factors that make the incarcerated—among others on the margins of American society—more vulnerable to this pandemic also render them less likely to earn obituaries. Those who didn’t earn mercy, or even attention, in life, are also less likely to earn it in death, especially when they have caused deep suffering. At The Marshall Project, my colleagues