After finishing his BA in Psychology at UMass Amherst, James Ferry's life took a turn for the worse. At the lowest point, he was serving a six-month prison sentence for drug dealing in California. When he got out, he was determined to start life anew—and return to western Massachusetts. The first stop was Goddard College, where he studied creative writing; the next stop, the UMass Amherst English Department, put him on the academic path he's on today. In a recent essay in Academe, he tells his story, titled, “How the Academy Saved My Soul—and Maybe My Life.”
Ferry is a PhD candidate at the University of Rhode Island. His creative work has been published in several literary journals, and he currently teaches college writing to prisoners preparing to reenter society. To learn more about him, please visit his website.