About the Author
Jason Yurcic was born in New Mexico while his father was in prison. Soon after release, his father was brutally murdered in a street fight.
His mother, unable to cope, turned to the bottle. He spent a lot of time at his
grandparents' junkyard and watched as his older brother got involved in a gang.
Yurcic ended up spending a lot of time mingling with gangs. "I'm a coyote — half
Mexican, half white — so I was given the name Little Ghost. That gang looked
really cool to me. They were like brothers, comrades in arms. I thought, I wish
I could have that."
Yurcic didn't need a gang to get so drunk that he beat up a police officer, which led to an appearance in court when he was 21. "Four counts of aggravated assault; I was facing 16 years in prison. But one of the Bernalillo County Sheriffs I assaulted pleaded with the judge to get me some counseling. Instead of a violent felon, he saw a little boy in the back seat. I'm grateful to him." Yurcic won and lost an athletic scholarship because he couldn't read or write well enough to complete college work. He became a professional boxer at 23, but eventually became disillusioned with violence.
Yurcic's first poem was a suicide note. He never finished it. He couldn't find the right words. "I was born to fill a prison cell," Yurcic wrote in one of his published poems, "Born Into Violence." Now Yurcic, with three published books and a produced play, teaches poetry and writing to youth and adults in prisons, schools and colleges. "I write books for people who don't read books. I give most of them away," he said of his collections.
Contact Jason Yurcic at jyurcic@aol.com
Jason
Yurcic
with Jimmy Santiago Baca and a couple of interns on a trip to Colorado to teach in a boys prison.