About the Author

Tony Vick was born in 1962, in Clarksville, Tennessee, into a home of Southern Baptist parents and an older brother. His father was a barber and gospel singer, and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. Tony's parents and brother have all died during Tony's incarceration. After excelling in high school, Tony received the "Outstanding Business Student" award and a scholarship to study business at the University of Tennessee. He worked in retail sales, banking, and, at one time, owned and operated a Southern-style restaurant.

Tony entered prison twenty years ago after living thirty-four years in Freedomsville as a closeted gay man. He is currently serving two life sentences for murder. While in prison, Tony has worked as a GED teaching assistant, clerk, and prison newspaper editor. He has been involved with Inside-Out prison programs where free-world college students travel to prisons and join incarcerated students as classmates in post-secondary courses built around dialogue, collaboration and experiential learning. Between 2010 and 2014, Tony completed five semesters in Vanderbilt University's Divinity School Inside-Out program.

In 2013, Tony's essay, "Look at Me," was published in a book, Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education, by Simone Weil Davis and Barbara Sherr Roswell. In 2016, Tony's thoughts on forgiveness were included in Michael McRay's book, Where the River Bends: Considering Forgiveness in the Lives of Prisoners. Tony continues to write essays and poetry that challenge readers to address prison reform as one of the most important social issues of this generation.





Michael T. McRay is a writer, advocate, educator, speaker, and the author of Where the River Bends (2015). He is a former volunteer prison chaplain and close friends with Tony Vick.

Reviews

"The power of Secrets from a Prison Cell is that it unflinchingly looks the reader directly in the eye, makes no claim of innocence or excuses for crime, and demonstrates that accountability and forgiveness are mutually enforcing, not in contradiction as our current failed system would have us believe. After reading this book, it will be all of us--citizens, leaders, teachers, clergy, lawmakers--who are left naked and morally compromised if we fail to act to transform a soul-crushing system of retribution into a process and means of restoration. Tony Vick has given us the gift of discomfort. May we use it well."
--Jeannie Alexander, Director, No Exceptions Prison Collective

"Prisons reveal the secreted nature of the regime that creates them. Two millennia ago John of Patmos pulled back the veil and exposed Rome's monstrous essence. Seven decades ago, Elie Wiesel's revelations of the concentration camps unmasked the sadistic bloodlust of the Nazi's reign. In this tradition Tony Vick's exposé of the prison-industrial complex divulges the concealed character of the American Empire. Like John's and Elie's revelations, Tony's call is neither for despair nor pity. No, here is a summons to action. Read this book and you must join the Resistance."
--Richard C. Goode, Lipscomb University

"2.2 million people are in U.S. prisons and jails, with millions more on probation and parole, but such statistics about our ever-expanding carceral society tend to prove powerless at touching hearts or even minds. Tony Vick's stories and poems have the creative power of word and image to make the prisoner's life-task of correction and rehabilitation a contribution to the urgently needed conversation among and within ourselves about who we are and what we might become as twenty-first-century Americans."
--Bruce T. Morrill, Professor, Vanderbilt Divinity School