About Dorsey
Dorsey Nunn was sentenced to life in prison before he started shaving. What followed was half a century of tireless advocacy for the civil and human rights of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Nunn has just retired as longtime Executive Director of the nonprofit Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. He’s also a proud co-founder of All of Us or None, a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people who are changing law and policy on their own behalf. Collective victories include expanding access to housing and employment, and restoring the vote to those on parole and probation. His powerful memoir, What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly, was released by Heyday Books in April 2024.
What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly
A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection
When Dorsey Nunn shuffled, shackled like a slave, into the California State carceral system at age nineteen, he could barely read. While caged he received an education he never could have anticipated. His first lesson: Prison had a color scheme, and it didn’t match the larger society. On the inside, guards stoked racial warfare among prisoners while on the outside the machinery of the criminal legal system increasingly targeted poor Black and Brown communities with offenses, real or contrived. Nunn emerged from San Quentin after ten years behind bars, radicalized by his experience and emboldened by the militant wisdom of the men he met there. He poured his heart and mind into liberating all those he left behind, building a nationwide movement to restore justice to millions of system-impacted Americans.
