“I hole up in my own cozy cubicle and write, considering ways to make the approaching Thanksgiving holiday not just another day in this place. In prison, hope faces east; time is measured in wake-ups.”Time of Grace is a remarkable book, written with great eloquence by a former science teacher who was incarcerated for twelve years for his sexual liaison with a teenage student. Far more than a “prison memoir,” it is an intimate and revealing look at relationships—with fellow humans and with the surprising wildlife of the Sonoran Desert, both inside and beyond prison walls. Throughout, Ken Lamberton reflects on human relations as they mimic and defy those of the natural world, whose rhythms calibrate Lamberton’s days and years behind bars. He writes with candor about his life, while observing desert flora and fauna with the insight and enthusiasm of a professional naturalist. While he studies a tarantula digging her way out of the packed earth and observes Mexican freetail bats sailing into the evening sky, Lamberton ruminates on his crime and on the wrenching effects it has had on his wife and three daughters. He writes of his connections with his fellow inmates—some of whom he teaches in prison classes—and with the guards who control them, sometimes with inexplicable cruelty. And he unflinchingly describes a prison system that has gone horribly wrong—a system entrapped in a self-created web of secrecy, fear, and lies. This is the final book of Lamberton’s trilogy about the twelve years he spent in prison. Readers of his earlier books will savor this last volume. Those who are only now discovering Lamberton’s distinctive voice—part poet, part scientist, part teacher, and always deeply, achingly human—will feel as if they are making a new friend. Gripping, sobering, and beautifully written, Lamberton’s memoir is an unforgettable exploration of crime, punishment, and the power of the human spirit.
I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on November 8, 1958, and moved to Tucson, Arizona, at the age of nine. In Tucson, I slowly and painfully learned to become a child of the desert, taking my first lessons in the front range of the Santa Catalina Mountains. In 1980, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in biology and for the next five years taught science. In 1987, I went to prison, where I joined the creative writing workshop of poet and author Richard Shelton and soon began publishing articles and essays about two subjects I knew well: prison and the natural history of the Southwest. It was only a matter of time before I would connect the two subjects on the page.
During my incarceration while mentoring with Richard Shelton, my articles and essays began appearing in national magazines and literary journals like Arizona Highways, Bird Watcher's Digest, Manoa, Northern Lights, Alligator Juniper, Puerto Del Sol, and the Gettysburg Review. Several of these essays, in turn, were selected for anthologies such as American Nature Writing, Getting Over the Color Green, and David Quammen's anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. Editors have nominated two of my essays for Pushcart Prizes, and Robert Atwan of The Best American Essays series listed my work in "Notable Essays of 1998" and again in "Notable Essays of 1999."
In January 2000, Mercury House published my first book, Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist's Observations from Prison, to critical acclaim. The San Francisco Chronicle called it, "...entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays...". The book won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing.
After my release from prison that same year, I completed my MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona, and continued writing and publishing essays and books about the Southwest. In 2010, The University of Arizona Press will publish my fifth book, Dry River, which deals with southern Arizona's Santa Cruz River, its nature, my family, and the people past and present who live alongside it. Today, I live with my wife in an 1890s stone cottage near Bisbee, Arizona.
