Thomas Bartlett Whitaker (TX)

Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Thomas Whitaker #02179411
P.O. Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400

If you would like to assist Thomas with his educational efforts please click HERE

Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is serving a life sentence in Texas. Since entering prison he has earned undergraduate degrees in English and Sociology, graduating Summa Cum Laude from Adams State University, and received a Master’s degree in Humanities from California State University. Thomas has won first place three times for the award categories fiction and essay in the national PEN Prison Writing Contest, and his works have been published in sources as varied as Guernica, The Washington Post Magazine, The Marshall Project, and in anthologies such as Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement and What We Know: Solutions from Our Experiences in the Justice System by The New Press, and The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison by Haymarket Books. His own book on Michel Foucault, Who Fears Hell Runs Toward It: On the Christian Metaphysical Foundations of the American Penitentiary and the Missing Image of Resistance in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, was deemed to be so dangerous to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s administration that they wrote a major case for it, a point that he is inordinately proud of. In 2018, Thomas was the recipient of PEN America’s Writing for Justice Fellowship, during which he produced “Dividing by Zero”, a series of long-form articles describing his last months on death row and his successful, last-minute clemency petition. Several hundred of his essays and stories have been published on Minutes Before Six, a literary journal for incarcerated writers that he founded in 2007 and which he still edits.

Thomas’s Amazon Wish List