Dorsey Nunn with Lee Romney

A decade behind bars spurs fifty powerful years of political and legal battles for freedom and human rights.

When Dorsey Nunn shuffled, shackled like a slave, into the California State carceral system at age nineteen, he could barely read. While caged he received an education he never could have anticipated. His first lesson: Pr*son had a color scheme, and it didn’t match the larger society. On the inside, guards stoked racial warfare among prisoners while on the outside the machinery of the criminal legal system increasingly targeted poor Black and Brown communities with offenses, real or contrived. Nunn emerged from San Quentin after ten years behind bars, radicalized by his experience and emboldened by the militant wisdom of the men he met there. He poured his heart and mind into liberating all those he left behind, building a nationwide movement to restore justice to millions of system-impacted Americans.

In his poignant, wry, and powerful memoir, What Kind of Bird Can't Fly?, Nunn links the politics of Black Power to the movements for Black lives and dignified reentry today. His story underscores the power of coalition building, persistence in the face of backlash, and the importance of centering the voices of experience in the fight for freedom—and proves, once and for all, that jailbirds can fly.

Dorsey Nunn will be in conversation with Lee Romney.

About the Author
Dorsey Nunn began advocating for the rights of California prisoners and their families while incarcerated. As codirector of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), in 2003 he cofounded All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working on their own behalf to secure their civil and human rights. AOUON is now the policy and advocacy arm of LSPC, which Nunn has led as executive director since 2011. Collective victories include ending indefinite solitary confinement in California, expanding access to housing and employment for formerly incarcerated people, and restoring the vote to those on parole and probation.

About the Moderator
Lee Romney spent twenty-three years as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she developed expertise in criminal justice and mental health. She is currently collaborating with a former public defender on the podcast November in My Soul.

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