What Kind of Bird Can't Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection (PB) (2024)

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: Prison had a a color scheme, and it didn't match the larger society. On the inside, guards stoked racial tensions between the largely Black and Brown inmates as the machinery of the criminal legal system denied prisoners' appeals and loaded them with new 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, launching a nationwide movement to restore justice to millions of system-impacted Americans. In this poignant, wry, and powerful autobiography, Nunn links the politics of Black Power to the movement for Black lives and prison abolition today. His story of the movement 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.