"Steel Bars and Stanzas"

Daryl Monroe was 28 when he was sentenced to 17 years for armed robbery. Born and raised in the rougher edges of Detroit, Daryl never had much of a chance to explore the softer side of himself. Poetry, to him, was something that belonged to school textbooks and soft-spoken professors—not young men dodging sirens and hustling to survive.

His mother died when he was 14, and his father had vanished long before that. The streets had taken care of him, in their own ruthless way. Daryl had always been good with words, a fast talker who could sell just about anything. Unfortunately, what he sold most often were stolen electronics and fake IDs.

In 2020, after a botched gas station robbery left a clerk injured, Daryl was arrested and sent to Michigan State Prison. At first, he carried himself with the toughness expected inside: guarded, cold, never showing weakness. But prison is long, and solitude wears you down. After a few months in solitary confinement for fighting, something broke open inside him.

He started scribbling thoughts on napkins, margins of newspapers, and eventually notebooks handed out by the prison counselor. What began as rage-filled rants became something more lyrical, more raw—more honest.

He didn’t even realize it was poetry until another inmate named Terrance, doing time for drug charges, read a few lines over Daryl’s shoulder during meal time.

“You ever read Langston Hughes?” Terrance asked.

“Nah,” Daryl muttered. “He a rapper?”

Terrance chuckled. “Not exactly. You write like him, though. You got rhythm in your pain.”

After that, the two started meeting in the prison library, swapping poetry books and dissecting verses like college students. The prison librarian, Ms. Avery, took notice and started encouraging Daryl to write more seriously. She suggested he submit a poem to a literary magazine that published writing from inmates.

Daryl was skeptical. Who would want to read poems from a convict?

But one night, he wrote something he couldn’t stop re-reading—a poem about the sound of the prison doors slamming shut, how it reminded him of his mother closing kitchen cabinets when she was upset. He titled it “Steel Lullaby”.

Ms. Avery helped him submit it to Cell Block Voices, a quarterly literary journal based in Chicago. He didn’t tell anyone, not even Terrance. He figured it would get tossed in the trash.

Two months later, he got a letter: the poem had been accepted.

It was a small publication—just a few hundred copies mailed to subscribers, academics, and prison advocacy groups. But for Daryl, it was everything. His name, printed in ink. His words, read by people he’d never met.

That publication sparked something deep. He began writing constantly—on the backs of commissary receipts, paper towels, legal pads. Ms. Avery connected him to PEN America’s Prison Writing Program. Daryl submitted five more poems and won an Honorable Mention.

Then, something bigger happened. A professor at Wayne State University who read his work in Cell Block Voices reached out. Dr. Eliza Mayfield taught creative writing and was working on an anthology of prison poetry. She wanted to include Daryl.

Over the next year, she mentored him by mail, sending him feedback, literature, and encouragement. Through her, he connected with a publisher interested in compiling a book of his poems.

By 2024, Daryl had a manuscript titled "Concrete Garden." It was filled with poetry about confinement, masculinity, race, and redemption. The publisher, Small Candle Press, specialized in unheard voices. The book came out in early 2025.

It didn’t sell thousands. But it made a quiet impact. A few local bookstores carried it. Professors used it in classrooms. Daryl even did a remote reading via a prison-authorized Zoom session—his voice shaky at first, but steady by the final stanza.

His fellow inmates began to respect him not for how tough he was, but for how honest he could be. One inmate told him that reading his poem about fatherhood made him cry for the first time in ten years.

Daryl still had years left on his sentence, but everything felt different. He wasn’t just inmate #442819 anymore. He was a poet. He had readers. He had a future.

When asked once in an interview what poetry gave him that prison couldn’t take away, he said:

“It gave me a name that I chose for myself.”

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