by TaSin Sabir
In “What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly,” Dorsey Nunn opens his life like a deep wound and a testimony. His story carries pain, survival, and the stubborn fight for justice, each page shaped by the bars that first held him at 19. Illiterate, young and caged, he began to see the world differently: “Prison has a color scheme, and it didn’t match the larger society.”
Inside Deuel Vocational Institution, memory and fate collide. On a dusty prison yard during a baseball game, Dorsey looks up and sees his whole Little League team, every player but the one white boy locked up beside him. That moment lands heavy, showing how deeply his community was already marked by the system.
From those years inside to his release from San Quentin a decade later, Dorsey walked through fire. He left radicalized, sharpened by the wisdom of other incarcerated people who turned confinement into classrooms and politics into survival. His book traces a line from Black Power to the fights of today, insisting that the voices shaped inside cages carry the kind of clarity this country cannot ignore.
He does not mince words. To him, the pennies paid to prisoners, the forced labor, the denial of parole for those who refuse to work – this is slavery by another name. His life, his writing, his organizing all bear witness against a system that measures people by their worst mistake.
But the book is not only about systems; it is also about love, anger and learning how to live again. Dorsey writes of the first time he held his son after years apart, the sound of Anthony’s footsteps pounding down a hallway toward him, the voice of a now teenager cutting through the silence like a knife. He writes of sitting in his friend Michael’s home, rage rising in him like it always did, until Michael placed a newborn baby in his arms. “It’s hard to stay angry when you’re holding a baby,” he admits. Small mercies like that kept teaching Dorsey what freedom could feel like.
Even when he returned to prison years later, not as an inmate but as a paralegal, memory flooded him. The stench of the visiting room hit his body with a force he compared to the belly of a slave ship. That moment tied his own survival to centuries of struggle, reminding him that the fight for dignity has always been bigger than one life.
The memoir also traces his path to sobriety, anchored by his daughter Denise. When she told him, “Daddy, if you fire that up, I’m gonna have to move,” he heard more than a warning. He heard a chance to change, to stand on his own terms. Sobriety became another way of rejecting the system’s hold on him.
“What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly” is a call to remember that punishment does not define us. That people are not disposable. That the human spirit, even beaten down, can still rise.
As Dorsey writes, “Little by little, I learned to change hearts and minds through oratory that came straight from the gut and straight from the heart.”
This book asks us to see justice as a shared responsibility. To believe that even against the odds we can still learn to fly.
Available at heydaybooks.com and amazon.com.
Tagline requested
