From inmate to author, Wahida Clark is ready to tell her own story

More than 20 years later, Wahida Clark, as she is now known, recounts that moment from the sitting room of her metro Atlanta home. At 50-something, she is petite and energetic, using animated gestures to punctuate her story. In a plaid shirt with black skinny jeans and a pearl choker, the self-titled “queen of street lit” is wearing square framed glasses, going without makeup and sporting a shaved head.

Clark, a former federal inmate turned New York Times bestselling author, is one of the most recognized names in the literary genre known for its gritty depictions of life on the streets. Once ignored by the mainstream, street lit has since become a cultural force that has influenced music, television and film. Becoming an author and publisher of street lit was a path forward for Clark — a way to support her family without confronting the societal challenges of being an ex-con, and a way to offer the same to other inmates. Today, her empire is expanding. She is currently filming a docuseries of her life and she runs a nonprofit with international reach, but part of her mission has remained the same.

“All I wanted to do was to publish authors, sell a lot of books and make noise for this genre,” Clark said. “We are making good stuff. It is good storytelling.”

Prison lit, street lit or urban fiction emerged 50 years ago, but some historians would argue that it has roots in the 19th century. “What we are calling prison literature is also what was coming out of the plantations right after Reconstruction,” said H. Bruce Franklin, author of “Prison Literature in America.” With mass incarceration in the late ’60s and 1970s, black prisoners began to connect their experiences to slavery, Franklin said. Donald Goines — a street hustler who began writing about his experiences while incarcerated — defined the modern genre, but it was then and in some ways remains invisible to the arbiters of American culture.

“The walls of a prison are designed not only to keep the prisoners in but to keep the rest of society from knowing what is going on inside. Prison literature is very subversive in that it reaches out from inside the prison to the larger society,” Franklin said. “This is different literature and separate from what people consider modern American literature, but it is extremely important.”

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A detour in life ends badly

Clark grew up in a housing project in Trenton, New Jersey. Her mother was 16 when she was born and struggled to care for Clark and her younger brother. When the family was evicted from the housing project in the dead of winter, they went to live with Clark’s aunt.

As a teen, Clark and her friends would steal school supplies, personal care items and other things they needed while trying to find ways to make money. During freshman year in high school, Clark and her friend met up with a group of older girls who had their own apartments and introduced them to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam.

Clark was enthralled. She stopped drinking and experimenting with drugs and began covering her head, a symbol of modesty. At 14, she ran away to New York City, where she spent nine months studying for Muslim Girl Training. The program for young women in the Nation of Islam includes training in life skills. Clark eventually returned home, but she had changed. She dropped out of school and moved in with a fellow Nation of Islam member.

“I had to get out of there. It was so much drama,” Clark said. “I wanted to practice Islam in peace without being bothered and harassed.”

She had also met Al Dickens, aka Uncle Yah Yah, an inmate in state prison serving time for bank robbery. Clark had read Dickens’ book based on his personal pearls of wisdom and told a friend she had to meet him. She was smitten with the older man, with whom she would have two daughters while he served 25 years in state and federal prisons. Dickens encouraged Clark to get a GED and attend community college. When he was transferred to a prison in Atlanta, Clark moved the entire family to DeKalb County. That’s when her life took a detour.

Driven by Nation of Islam teachings of self-reliance, Clark always had an entrepreneurial streak. In Atlanta, she and her family branched into everything from landscaping to multilevel marketing. Clark shifted from an administrative job to telemarketing so she would have time to visit Dickens in prison. She eventually began working for American Eagle Advertising, a Chamblee-based company that engaged in fraudulent telemarketing sales for 18 months, according to court documents. Clark was a top seller, sometimes making $100,000 in sales a week by upselling senior citizens on items like gold coins and high-end business supplies.

The feds had been watching the business for years before the day they stormed the offices. Clark declined to take a plea bargain, and after a 17-week trial in Arizona, where the company headquarters was a front for money laundering, a jury found Clark and her co-defendants guilty of wire fraud and money laundering. Clark was sentenced to 10.5 years in federal prison.

Writing from behind bars

When Clark entered the women’s federal penitentiary in Lexington, Kentucky, Dickens, her husband, was just finishing his prison term. She hadn’t been able to return home to get the family affairs in order. One day, she called to get money for her commissary account, but her family told her there was nothing to give. All of their businesses were gone. All of the money was gone. The cars were being repossessed and the house was in foreclosure. They had even pawned her Rolex watch for $50. Clark worked in the library at prison and taught computer classes, but she knew she needed more money. She hung up the phone and started to pray.

“I said, ‘Allah, what am I going to do right now to make money while I am in prison?’ Also ‘Lord, my kids are on the outside and I have to take care of them. My husband is locked up and I need to send him money.’ Very shortly after that, he sent me an answer,” Clark said.

Prison jobs in federal prisons usually pay 25 cents to $1 per hour, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, director, Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Any money inmates do make can be directed to paying court fees, restitution or the cost of incarceration. “For the vast majority of people behind bars, there is no way to provide for their families,” Eisen said. But Clark would become an outlier, one of a small group of inmates who would take their experiences, real or fictionalized, and turn a profit by writing about them from behind bars.

In 2016, Curtis Dawkins, who is serving a life sentence in Michigan for murdering a man during a botched robbery, scored a book deal with Simon and Schuster for $150,000. Two years later, the state wanted him to redirect 90% of his assets from an education fund for his three children to state coffers to pay for cost of his imprisonment, according to a report in The New York Times. But before Dawkins was an inmate, he earned a masters of fine arts degree. Clark, like most other inmates writing in the street lit genre, had no such training.

Her turning point was seeing a magazine story about Shannon Holmes, a pioneer of modern street lit who had no prior writing experience, write a book while in prison. Clark began to envision her own name on the spines of books in the library. She told her husband. “He said, ‘If you are going to write a book, the only thing they are buying from us is about pimping, hoeing and drugs,’” she said.

She came up with a storyline, a tale of three women choosing between the thugs they love or a life beyond crime, and wrote every day in longhand on a yellow legal pad. She signed up for a creative writing class and started reading urban literature. In six months, Clark had the makings of a novel. She wrote to Carl Weber, a popular African American author at the time, for advice on getting published. Weber wrote back and told her he was starting a publishing company.

“That was when I got my first book deal,” Clark said. She had family members type her manuscript, and she asked prison staff to help her get it copied. When the book was published in 2002, 15 copies arrived at the prison, but the check for $25,000 in royalties bounced and the company went out of business, she said. Weber did not respond to a request for comment on the deal.

Despite Clark not receiving that money, the prison lieutenant took notice of Clark’s burgeoning success. She was summoned to the office and grilled on how she managed to publish a book while in jail, Clark said. Clark ended up in solitary confinement. “They said I was there for writing a book and profiting from it when the prison says you are not supposed to do that,” she said.

Most people behind bars are not getting book deals, so policies can vary from one prison to the next, said experts. “The few situations where someone had a source of income that was significant that was not part of the prison economy, those are taken on a case-by-case basis,” Eisen said. During nine months spent in solitary confinement, Clark started writing what would become her second book series. When she was transferred to Alderson, the minimum-security women’s prison in West Virginia, she got an agent, a new book deal and an advance from Kensington Publishing Corp.

Meeting Martha

Street lit was experiencing a renaissance, and publishing houses were paying attention. “Mainstream publishers saw there was a real desire from readers to have books about this part of people’s lives, and since authenticity is so important in this genre, working with people who had been in prison was the right way forward,” said Esi Sogah, executive editor at Kensington Publishing. In 2000, the company launched the Dafina imprint specifically to publish books that centered on race and cultural identity. At any given time, editors are likely to be working with two to three authors who are incarcerated, Sogah said. The biggest challenge is communication.

“You can’t just make a quick phone call if there’s a story point that needs clarifying. Normally, we work with an author’s representative — sometimes a literary agent or lawyer, but often a family member,” Sogah said. “This person is an equally important part of the process as the author, responsible for managing communication and handling any marketing requirements that would be difficult from prison.”

Under Kensington’s Dafina imprint, Clark’s books, “Thugs and the Women Who Love Them” and “Every Thug Needs a Lady,” began to hit bestseller lists in USA Today and Essence Magazine. She would later be credited with creating a subgenre of street lit with stories about street thugs who are also family men and doting fathers.

But Clark ran into trouble again when her books came out. Prison officials took away her privileges, but she kept writing. Not only did she want to support her family, but she also had to pay $290 a month in restitution for her crimes. The publisher paid her earnings directly to her family, she said.

In October 2004, the mundane pace of prison life got a jolt of excitement. Clark’s prison mom, Diana Sanchez, practically flew into the television room to tell Clark that media maven Martha Stewart had arrived. Stewart had been found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators in an insider trading scandal. “Get dressed!” Sanchez yelled. “The lady is here. The lady is here.”

Clark got dressed and walked into what she could only describe as a meet and greet. She introduced herself but didn’t interact with Stewart much until she asked her to participate in a career day with a presentation on business trends. Clark did a presentation on writing and publishing as she was prepping to launch a publishing company. She asked Stewart to review her business plan before Stewart finished serving her sentence.

By the time she entered a halfway house in New Jersey in 2007, Clark had published seven books and had two manuscripts waiting to launch her publishing company, W. Clark Publishing. Her authors included Cash, an inmate in Georgia State Prison who would go on to launch his own publishing company.

Well-versed in the street lit genre, Clark looked for authors who could paint a picture for readers and make it feel real, even if it wasn’t true to their experiences. “They say, write what you know, but to me, your imagination can take you wherever you want to go,” Clark said. “It is basically what they know and live, but you add that something extra to give it that edge.”

‘A bit of a legend’

To celebrate 20 years of the Dafina imprint, Kensington has published reissues of Clark’s early books. “Wahida is a bit of a legend, both in the street lit genre and in publishing,” said Sogah, the Kensington editor.

Over the decades, the street lit market has become increasingly saturated. Unwilling to wait for entry into traditional avenues, more urban authors have branched off and created their own publishing companies, Sogah said, with their influence extending into popular entertainment. “One thing I think will be interesting as we move forward is seeing more people turn to street lit to engage with our current conversations about mass incarceration and prison reform,” Sogah said.

There are about 30 authors on the roster of W. Clark Publishing, most of whom are current or former inmates. Clark has mentored and taught more than a few people. Now she is looking beyond publishing.

On a recent morning in February, Clark is recovering after a trip to Ghana, where she picked up two strains of E. coli and salmonella. She was there for the nonprofit Prodigal Sons and Daughters. Clark serves as vice president of the organization through which she hopes to reach an increasingly younger population of inmates entering prison with limited life skills and education.

In Ghana, the organization is working to open a state-of-the-art mental health facility and prison. “It is a huge commitment,” said Clark, but it helps that her family — including her husband and daughters, now in their 30s — continue to be engaged in business affairs.

With the release of her 15th book, “Thugs: Seven,” the time seemed right for Clark to reflect on her life and success and the ways in which prison gave her the drive to remain independent and reach back to help some of the people she met along the way. If she learned anything behind bars, it was to never waste time because you don’t get it back, she said.

Lately, Clark’s schedule is a blur of media appearances and international travel. She is often trailed by a film crew as she returns to the places in New Jersey and Atlanta that helped shape her life. She views the docuseries as just another way for her to tell a story — one that happens to be her own. It is the one book she has yet to write, she said, but she is working on it.