WOMEN ON THE ROW - Hardcover

Kathleen O'Shea didn't set out looking for connections with women on death row. She wanted information about them -- who they are, the ways in which they live from day to day. "I was writing a sociological reference book", she tells us, "a fairly safe, fairly emotionless endeavor". As she got to know the incarcerated women she was studying, however, what became clear to her were not their differences, but how, in so many ways, she and the women in prison were the same.

Arguably, Kathleen O'Shea is the only person to have contacted every woman currently in U.S. prisons under a death sentence. Women On The Row: Revelations From Both Sides of the Bars is her honest, startling, sometimes raw, sometimes radiant exploration of the places where doing heavy time and being free overlap.

Neither a treatise against the death penalty, nor an apologia for female innocence, Women On The Row focuses on the interconnectedness of women's lives. The author creates memorable composite portraits of ten death row women based on her conversations with them, on information that has been given to her, and juxtaposes vignettes from her own life "outside" for a call and response across realities. She reflects on her encounters with condemned women and how their stories illuminate her own. In the process, she gives us creative nonfiction with the power to challenge deeply held assumptions.