This provocative debut from National Poetry Slam Champion Carlos Contreras is a conversation in two parts: one, a monologue-style musing on working in a correction facility told from an insider/outsider perspective; and two, an homage to veterans of other kinds of war who must learn to live inside and outside their own prisons of mind and body.
Time Served is poetic proof of Carlos Contreras's personal and literary commitment to serve as a respectful and honest witness to painful struggles, dark corners, unexpected art, and honest humanity that exist in and outside of correctional facilities; exist in and outside of not-so-perfect, but loving families; and most definitely reside within all human beings.'--Shelle Sanchez, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs
Time Served is a rich and rigid work cementing Carlos Contreras as a major voice of the American Southwest. In these tragic yet lovingly rendered confessions Contreras examines the physical and emotional prisons forced upon us.'--Idris Goodwin, author of These Are the Breaks
Carlos Contreras is a writing teacher and National Poetry Slam Champion. For five years he has taught incarcerated adults at the Gordon Bernell Charter School in the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the lead facilitator for the Voces youth writing program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center and a cofounder of Just Write, a prison and public writing program. His previous chapbooks include AManinPieces and TheBlackBook.
