Reading for Change

Welcome! Reading has changed so many lives over the course of humankind and it can change yours too.“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

I Turned on The Lights in Hell

I had a privileged childhood: a two-parent household, baseball diamonds and sports, family vacations. Everything was set up for me to succeed. But as a teenager, left unsupervised for hundreds of days, I chased the wrong kind of power — the pseudo-power sold by rap videos, delinquent friends, and social media. I bought the lie, made a string of bad choices, and woke up sentenced to die in prison.Georgia’s prisons aren’t rehabilitation; they’re war zones. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice condemned conditions across the statewide system as unconstitutional—rife with savage, near-constant atrocities: daily stabbings, rapes, murders, all fueled by severe understaffing that leaves the most violent prisoners in control and men fighting for survival like in some dystopian nightmare.
Most break. Many become animals.In that constant warfare, books became my lifeline. They kept me from sinking all the way into barbarism. Stoicism, philosophy, neuroscience, stories of redemption—they forced me to stare at my mistakes, tear down the lies that lured me, rebuild my mind piece by piece, and forge a mind strong enough to survive the chaos around me.
In that darkness, reading became my education and my salvation. Books didn’t just pass time—they rebuilt me. They taught me accountability, stripped away the delusions, and showed me how the mind actually works.This memoir is the unfiltered truth of my fall and my awakening. Raw, unflinching, and ultimately hopeful, it’s more than a story—it’s a warning and a wake-up call. I turned on the lights in my own hell to expose the shadows that prey on the vulnerable and impressionable minds of kids.Now I fight a different war: exposing the lies that trap kids and arming them with the books that saved me. This is my battlefield report—pain, truth, and the light I finally turned on in hell.One book can change everything.

About / My Story

Reading for Change was founded because reading has been the single most powerful force that transformed my own life. It shifted me from a path of confusion, bad influences, poor decisions, and ultimately a life sentence, to one of awakening, self-improvement, and purpose.In prison, where everything else in life was stripped away, books became my lifeline. They exposed me to ideas about Stoicism, philosophy, brain science, financial literacy, and personal growth that I’d never encountered before. Those pages didn’t just pass the time. They rewired my thinking, reawakened my empathy, built my resilience, and gave me the tools to “Turn On the Lights in Hell,” as I titled my memoir.I’ve seen firsthand how many young people around me are missing these same life-changing concepts, not because they can’t learn them, but because no one has ever put the right books in their hands or shown them why it matters. That’s the gap my mission is committed to fill.Reading for Change exists to make transformative reading accessible, especially for youth at risk. It promotes positive ideas, productivity, accountability, and real growth as an alternative to negative influences like certain music, unsupervised social media, or digital overload. It’s my way of paying forward the change that books created in me, helping others avoid the mistakes I made and build better lives, one page at a time.Reading changed me, and now I’m scaling that change for the world.