Memoir
Prison and the Poet
Correctional is a migrant family story, prison memoir, record of a spiritual journey, love story, and morality tale. It is also an examination of race and policing in America and a critique of class on two continents. It is the record of an imperfect life closely and critically examined. Although personal revelations abound, author Ravi Shankar insists this book is not a ‘confessional’ but a ‘correctional’. Most simply, it is, he tells us, ‘the true story of how, in the middle of a seemingly successful life, I suddenly ended up in jail.’
Beyond Beirut
I found myself wanting to document the experience of reading Majdalani’s journal, to connect with the incidental way he captured our shared motherland at a singular moment in its history. This was a primary source that would invite me in to share the pain, so unlike the dry and objective arms-length journalism and history I was accustomed to.