Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, Expanded Edition

- In Dec 2018, Judge Leon Tucker of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas threw out the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s repeated denials of Mumia’s appeals—five appeals over 27 years. Mumia will now be able to argue his innocence, expose the tainted evidence and chronic police and judicial misconduct which, according to Amnesty International, denied Mumia the fair and impartial trial guaranteed to all citizens, despite their race or political orientation. News of Tucker’s decision was reported in A-list papers & media, including NPR, the New York Times, and Washington Post. Democracy Now! did a feature segment with Johanna Fernandez (editor, Writing on the Wall: Selected Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal). Mumia clearly makes national news.

- If an appeal by the Philadelphia PA is not filed within 30 days of Judge Tucker’s ruling, Mumia’s appeal will begin and the path to freedom opens. This process will involve lots of hearings, strong allegations of police misconduct and institutional racism, and can be expected to both populate the news cycle and seriously energize and mobilize national and international response from citizen action groups, social justice movements, and public intellectuals, artists, and academics.

- In a surreal turn of events, the very day after Tucker announced his decision, six previously unacknowledged (in judicial databases) boxes of files labeled Mumia were “discovered” in an abandoned furniture closet at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office on 3 South Penn Square. The contents of the boxes have yet to be disclosed....

- Death Blossoms, Mumia’s out of print 2nd book, was written by hand during a window of time in Spring 1996 when Mumia was on Death Row and living under a death warrant, something not known or pointed out in the original edition. Mumia will write about this in his new introduction. The book will also feature an updated foreword by Cornel West.

- In a recent email to us Mumia wrote, “There is still, at this late date, a shortage of prison literature, fewer still of Death Row. What of being on Phase II, when the writer literally has a finite date to die? I know of no parallel. [Imagine that] you have less than 3 months until you die at the hands of the State. What does such a man think about? What are his dreams? His hopes? Death Blossoms gives us a rare taste of that surreal reality.”

- Finally, we are considering including as an appendix Amnesty International’s 38-page report documenting the racism and official misconduct on display in Mumia’s trial. We feel this may add value to the book and increase its direct relevance to any and all appeal proceedings. Movement supporters and advocates will be motivated for as many people as possible to read the report, this increasing sales potential.

Link to the report: www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/001/2000/en/

Mumia, in many ways, continues to be a moral, intellectual, and political mentor of the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement’s involvement in spreading awareness of the book will elevate its profile, relevance, and success.

We'll try to book remote events with Mumia over the phone (which has happened before) and events with Johanna Fernandez, who was the editor for a previous book by Mumia we published, Writing on the Wall, and is a key figure in the ongoing movement for his freedom. These events are attended by people who support Mumia publicly and have been rallying for his freedom for years.

© 2019 City Lights Publishers (Ebook): 9780872868014

Release date

Ebook: 17 December 2019