Indie Entertainment Podcast

Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning American poet and screenwriter of Chicano descent. ​While serving a five-year sentence in a maximum security prison, he learned to read and began to turn his life around, eventually emerging as a prolific artist of the spoken and written word. ​He is a winner of the prestigious International Award for his memoir, "A Place to Stand," the story of which is now also a documentary by the same title. ​I first came to write poetry as a young man in prison. First came reading (from an anthology stolen from a jail guard):  "It was late when I returned to my cell. Under my blanket I switched on a pen flashlight and opened the thick book at random, scanning the pages. I could hear the jailer making his rounds on the other tiers. The jangle of his keys and the sharp click of his boot heels intensified my solitude. Slowly I enunciated the words… p-o-n-d, ri-pple. It scared me that I had been reduced to this to find comfort. I always had thought reading a waste of time, that nothing