The Wound Is Where the Light Enters

In the vein of Writing My Wrongs, a memoir from a young man sentenced to life in prison, who gave such a moving speech during his trial that the judge left his position and fought to free him, shining a light on the prison industrial complex and showing how potential remains locked behind bars. Were our world more just, Chris Young would probably have a doctorate or be the CEO of a tech company instead of having spent eleven years in prison. The Wound Is Where the Light Enters takes readers through the impossible circumstances of Chris’s childhood and young adulthood in poverty and addiction-ridden Clarksville, Tennessee—circumstances that made prison, or death, look all but inevitable. At the age of 22, he was arrested on drug charges, and because of draconian sentencing laws, given a life sentence. Once imprisoned, however, he fought against the nihilism all around him and the trauma of his past, and doggedly pursued an intellectual life: He studied philosophy, art, archaeology, anthropology, history, economics, astrophysics, cosmology, quantum physics, biology, philology, and politics, learned to play the stock market, and taught himself how to code without a computer. As shown in this stunning memoir, Chris's mind is an indictment of how much potential remains locked up behind bars, at a time when we are reexamining our prison system like never before. More than an issue-driven book, however, The Wound Is Where the Light Enters is an homage to books themselves, and an exploration of what it means to be self-educated in the purest sense.