When I was in prison I would write home about what my day-to-day experience was to my siblings, to my aunts, to pass girlfriends, and people in the neighborhood neighborhood and they would be like,

oh, can you write me another one of those letters?

Like, you just brought me into that world and again, I'm not making the connection

between letter writers is just how I expressed myself and actually writing.

But where it started to come full circle for me was a guy on a cell, like I was at Michigan

Reformatory.

And there was this guy, he was the editor for the

prison newspaper and he came to myself and he was like we just lost one of our

writers can you write an article to feel this gap for the next paper and I'm like why are you asking me to write a paper like why would I be writing for a news paper and he just simply said you seem like you smart and so I thought about what I wanted to write and I ended up I went on a visit and on that visit I found out that my sister my oldest is one years older than my name is Vanessa. I found out that she was battling addiction and it was heartbreaking because this was my best friend and I wasn't there to help her support her protect her all the things that you think we're responsible for.

And it was heartbreaking, you know, and so I ended up writing about what that felt like to know

that my sister was now in this world of addiction and knowing that I had come out of drug culture.

Hey there it's Light Watkins, your host of at the end of the tunnel, which is a

podcast that features the backstories

of luminaries who have found their purpose with both large and small causes

oftentimes after navigating very dark tunnels.

And they are now using their platform or their art

or their voice, or in this case,

they're writing in creative ways

that leave the world a better place. My guest today is Shaka Sangor. So Shaka is from Detroit. He came from a relatively stable household, but after his parents split up when he was 14 years old, he left home, and he got

involved in drug dealing and then ultimately in drug using, Chaka was beaten, he was sexually abused over those years, he

ended up sleeping in garages and crack houses, he got shot three times, and while

Shaka was being hardened by street life over those years, he became a teenage father.

...