Half of the people imprisoned in America are parents, which means over two million children grow up with their parents in cages. In his essay, Twenty-One Birthdays, Kennedy Amenya Gisege celebrates a lifetime of birthdays separated from his daughter. Each year, he makes a quiet offering to a photo on the wall. The years accumulate until, at last, she is grown and he remains behind bars. Tender, heart-wrenching, and loving, Gisege's work illuminates the intimate human cost of prison's severings.

Kennedy Amenya Gisege is a visual artist, poet, and writer and author of The Liturgy of Smell (Red Bird Chapbooks). He's co-editor of American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023) His work appears in AGNI, Bangalore Review, and South Dakota Review, among other journals. He has written two books under the pen name Ken Amen.

"Kennedy Amenya Gisege's moving Twenty-One Birthdays follows an incarcerated father, year after year, as he celebrates his daughter's birthdays in absentia. Gisege has written an exquisite work that will, at once, break and mend your heart." — Nicole Sealey

"Heartbreaking and beautiful, each passage in Kennedy Amenya Gisege's Twenty-One Birthdays is a tally mark seared into cinder block with tears. In this stunning poet's hands, unadorned images of an orange peel, green beans, and popcorn kernels turn into talismanic, vivid offerings to a crumbling photograph pasted to a wall. Here is an account of loss that refuses to lose everything. Gisege sees the tragedy and hope in that refusal. I saw the deep sadness attending the love of an incarcerated parent." — Douglas Kearney

"In an act of extraordinary creative will, Kennedy Amenya Gisege defines a whole world from one single day, each year. Time in this world is only twenty-one days, but feels infinite--a world not confined but built on possibility and surprise: It's these twenty-one slight shifts that telescope our empathy, and prove the power of Gisege's fine poetic sensibilities." — Heid E. Edrich

"Twenty-One Birthdays is a creative explosion of language that measures time: the distance between a dad inside the carceral state and a daughter living in the free world. Writer Kennedy Amenya Gisege skillfully uses imagination as a starting point for reconciliation and perhaps, forgiveness; and yes, we as readers are swept inside the narrator's guilt, guided by beautiful prose, which is grounded in both lyric and poetic intent. Each reflection in this chapbook reflects a year, as in twenty-one birthdays, as in twenty-one attempts of a father trying to connect to a daughter he can only imagine. This documentation of love and mercy offers the kind of hope and belief we all need in our lives." — Randall Horton