When A Jailbird Sings
The Birth of a Poet
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When A Jailbird Sings: The Birth of a Poet is Daniel L. Smith's collection of poems drawn from his archives — love, family, life, and the realities of incarceration.
The writing began long before the book. Daniel first fell for poetry in the ninth grade, reading Emily Dickinson. Years later, during his incarceration from November 1995 to September 1996, the words caught fire. He wrote poems for fellow inmates on whatever he could find — scraps of paper, even toilet paper — giving voice to men who had none.
That is why he writes: because a poem can carry hope into places hope rarely reaches, and because the men and women still inside those walls deserve to hear that their story is not over.
He went on to self-publish his first collection, This Is Who I Am, moving more than 500 copies by hand. More than twenty-five years later, he returns with the poems that started it all — a testimony of struggle, redemption, and finding your voice in the hardest places.
Daniel L. Smith is a poet whose gift was born behind bars and refined by a lifetime of looking back with honesty. Writing first for the men locked up beside him, he learned that a poem can carry hope into places hope rarely reaches.
When A Jailbird Sings, published by Leumas Publishing LLC, gathers the work of those years and the life that followed — poems of love, family, faith, and the long road home.