Interview with author JUSTIN AMEN FLOYD, CAROLINE MCGILL

My life is a book. A book that if I actually took the time to write, you wouldn't be able to put down, until after you had absorbed and digested every sentence, every single word. Page after page; chapter after chapter of tears, laughter, poverty, incarceration, anger, oppression, pain and change. Most importantly though is the change.

            Any animal that doesn't change and adapt to their environment eventually becomes a casualty of that environment! That's exactly what I was... an animal from Greenville S.C. that preyed upon anything and anybody that would get me paid.
Eventually this mind state led me to a lifetime of being incarcerated in one institution after another. First juvenile and then as I became more brazen and my crimes bolder and more reckless, the penitentiary. Sentenced to 10 years in one of the nastiest, most oppressive correctional systems in America for bank robbery I continued to unconsciously rebel against the system. Then I discovered the power of words and how when writing them I was allowed a brief reprieve from the stifling, oppressive, violent environment in which I lived.

            So I started writing. It became my escape, my salvation. Learning that I had the ability to make people feel my words, my stories, let me know that I could be something else besides a career criminal. The talent to write allowed me the ability to change and also gave me another avenue to express my anger at a system that had stacked the deck against me and so many others like me from the very first day we came into existence.
My life is a book. Keep reading...and enjoy.