The author recounts her experiences as a literary artist who instinctively understood poetry could save lives and tells the stories of inmates as part of her effort to effect social change through poetry. The author served as poet-in-residence at San Quentin between 1985 and 1989 and came to know many of the inmates who participated in her poetry sessions. She watched the inmates live their lives behind bars and what she witnessed taught her as much about what it meant to be a human being as she taught her students about poetry. The author found that, in working with inmates, her job was to encourage inmates to speak and then for her to listen as well as she could. She describes her experiences at San Quentin, beginning with the first 3 months, and then goes on to discuss how she dealt with inmate perceptions and the nature of the prison experience and how she used poetry as an expressive outlet of inmate feelings and emotions. Notes