We have lisa forbes joining us tonight and if youre here for the event please come over and join us. We have some comfy couches over your in the lounge. If youre not here for the event no problem, just be mindful of the people around you that are here for the event. Ifyou want to have a conversation we have other tables in the back. We have patio seating. But we do want to invite you to join this event because its going to be amazing. So a little bit about book bar. We are a nineyearold bookstore wine bar here in the art district of northwest dunbar and we actually just got through a pandemic and bought another bookstore, a childrens bookstore down in south denver, colorado and mississippi. When we bought app store we became a Public Benefit organization which means our purpose is to give back to the community so 10 percent of all our book sales from here and our other bookstore go to our Nonprofit Organization called book gives and it exists to give books out to the community. You can think of it as a, like a food bank for books. We accept donations, give them back out to anyone who needs them and we also purchase new books for schools, libraries, prisons, assisted living facilities so makes me very proud to be able to give back to the community and be way more than retail. So that being said i would now like to introduce lisa forbes. Lisa forbes grew up poor on the south side of chicago. Next time she started her own company to help restore citizens with postprison life. Based in denver she spoken widely and conducted many workshops. Previously the steak indications director for the league of women voters of colorado forbes now and its her local county needs monthly newsletter the voter. Additionally she is a colorado cocoordinator at better angel, a national citizensmovement to bring lsliberals and conservatives together at the grassroots level. Its all about getting people together and have conversations, get to know each other. Welcome lisa forbes doing amazingwork. All right. For so much of my life reading has been my refuge so im thankful to be supported by the independent bookstores were the source of the books that nourished me when i needed it most. I can take it from here is more than a book title. Its the statement i wantto make about myself. And just as importantly its also a vision. Its the vision i hold of other people that they too can get to the point where they can take it from wherever they find themselves at this moment. I spent 14 years in prison for killing my daughters father. In the book i refer to myself as a restored is an and i use it to describe people whove been released from prison but the term has special meaning for me. Theres a scripture in the bible which i read while in prison that says god will restore to you the years that the canker worm locust and calico or had devoured. When i read that promise i claimed it for myself. I wanted to be restored to the life i knew i wascapable of living. I have read and loved many memoirs but what i didnt see in them was a pathway to break the chains of trauma that were keeping people tied to their past. Toni morrison said if theres a book you want to read it hasnt been written yet, then you must write it. So i wrote it. When istarted writing this book , i wanted to write it for people who had been incarcerated. I wanted to share my experiences with them and give them not just hope but give them a tool that they could use like i did to create permanent change in their lives. But as i kept writing and sharing my draft along the way people who had never been in prison started sharing their stories with me and then i realized trauma is trauma. You dont have to ever have been arrested to be in a prison in your ownlife. And while obviously not every traumatized person goes on to commit a crime it is nevertheless an underrecognized fact that most former prisoners in the United States were traumatized isbefore they ever entered prison or while in prison. Many published studies indicate that the majority of incarcerated people experience childhood abuse or neglect. And this was certainly true for me. So i learned to share a few of my experiences with you and perhaps show how the pressure of those experiences led to my own emotional breakdowns and eventual incarceration. I grew up with five brothers and sisters in cramped Public Housing apartment on the south side of chicago. I experienced religious and Emotional Abuse i got hit by a car when i was four. My mother told me that it happened because i was hardheaded and disobedient. And that became the first and along the line of events in which i was told that bad things happen to me because i was a bad person. Me my mother was also in a religious group that was waiting for the end of the world. Waand her role was divided between the sheep and the goats. The sheep were the people in her religion. She told me that since i was rebellious i was a goat. That meant when armageddon came which could be at any moment, god was going to destroy me. And imagine being told that every day when youre in kindergarten. I was also sexually abused on a daily basis by one of my brothers beginning at the age of eight. My father was an alcoholic. And even though my mother taught me how to read when i was three she encouraged me to read only the books and magazines published by her religiousgroups. I found solace in reading greek and roman apology that was loaned to me by one of my teachers. I read about the goddess athena had no mother but she rang fully grown from her fathers head wearing a suit of armor full of wisdom but also able to defend herself. And athena was everything li wanted to be. I graduated from high school at 15. But my mother said i didnt need any more worldly knowledge. So instead of being sent off to college, i was given a workers permit and sent to a job in Downtown Chicago office. At 16 i was pregnant by aman i met on that job. And when my daughter was just a toddler i stabbed her father whose name was james in a fit of rage and spent 14 years in prison convicted of murder. I realize that at this point li its normal for people to want to know what happened. And there are a lot of details about the crime in the book and i will read some but i also just wanted to talk to you from the heart. Because you may think that with the writing and rewriting and editing of this book that i would have it down pat how to tell this story the truth is it never gets easy when you talk about this and maybe it never should. I do want to say that i take full responsibility for what happened and i dont write anything in this book to justify myself. When i was 19 years old and anger and rejection had permeated my life up until that point and id like to read to you how i describe it in the book. I didnt know how to respect other peoples boundaries. No one had respected mine, not even as a child. Not even where my body was concerned. I was constantly violated and not as an adult where i stayed in emotionally abusive relationships and justified what the person was doing to me, identifying with them. I had no boundaries and i didnt recognize them in others. I didnt know where they began or ended. I tended to merge withother people in order to feel connected. I always lost myself in any relationship. When other people maintain what were in fact normal boundaries, i felt threatened and would last out at them for not being honest with me. Unfortunately the way i last out was cruel but i didnt realize it at the time. I had been treated so cruelly all my life by people who told me they were just being truthful that i didnt know how to express my feelings withkindness. I also didnt know how to take responsibility for my feelings. And i didnt realize that my efforts to get people to be honest with me and tell me everything worked really an attempt to control them. I needed to be or at least feel in control order to feel safe. And when i felt like people were keeping me out i felt rejected. And being rejected made me feel like a person might do something bad to me. So this was my emotional state. When i interacted with other people. And it was my emotional state when i rang james doorbell in december 1985. I wasnt even supposed to be at james house that day. I had taken the Greyhound Bus that morning from milwaukee to chicago and i was planning to visit my parents were on a surprise visit and let them visit with my twoyearold daughter when i got there they werent home. So i decided to go to james house and let him visit while i waited for my parents to come home and they didnt live that farfrom each other. When i rang his doorbell some one peeked out from behind the curtains and it didnt look like him. And then they closed them back. I didnt think that james would see me standing with mercedes at the door in the cold and not let me in. Ineven if you wouldnt let me and i thought he would let his twoyearold daughter in. And in my mind i said something must be wrong in that house. And then i experienced what i can only describe as an irresistible impulse to get in that house. And ironically i wanted to make sure that james was okay. Thats the incongruous part of this whole thing. I read went to the Grocery Store down the street and bought a knife. Because i felt like something might be happening to james. I thought that maybe once i got in i would need to be able to defend myself and him against whoever it was who had that window. Thats what i was thinking when i bought the knife. But when i got inside e and he made me feel so humiliated, he laughed at me about that. I felt so stupid forthinking that maybe i could help him. Really just triggered a lifetime of memories and embarrassment and shame and i just lost all control. I started to feel like i was in a dream. It didnt feel real when i stabbed him. And i felt like i was watching what was happening from a distance. I cannot explain this crime in a way that makes it sound defensible and i always tell people that if ihad been on my journey i would have convicted me to. However, when people asked me why didnt you just leave, i can only answer that i could only make the decision that my traumatized mind would allow me to make in that moment. And the decision i made in that moment was essentially to project everything that had ever happened to me in my childhood and from that point forward on to james and then punish him with for my life. After a five day trial it took the jury less than an hour to convict me. One of the jurors select slept off and on through the trial. The judge repeatedly instructed the bayless to wake her up. The judge then sentenced me to 25 years in prison. At my sentencing hearing he said it is too late for James Langston and indeed it is too late for lisa forbes but something in me new that could not be true. I couldnt change what i had done, but i could change who i was being. In prison i escaped back into books just as i had in childhood. I spent as much time as i could in the Prison Library. I discovered mark twain who was the first person whomade me laugh out loud. I read the complete works of William Shakespeare but i also read works like revolutionary suicide by queuing in, the autobiography of malcolm x, the wretched earth and the bluest eye by Toni Morrison and ironically, mein kampf by adolf hitler was on the Prison Library shelf and i read. I was 19 when i went to prison and 33 when i was paroled. When i came home reentry organizations that helps prisoners find jobs would not touch me. With my crime i was considered the worst of the worst. Because what i wanted most was security nine months after i got out i married a man who was my fathers age and who had five children who were older than me. Having grown up as the youngest of six children it didnt take me long to realize i had almost perfectly recreated my childhood. I moved with him from georgia to our rural area outside of atlanta. The marriage was rooted in control and i was right back in prison. It was only when i realized that i was stuck in repeating loop, a pattern that was created by trauma and i began to address the underlying trauma that i truly began to be given to move forward. I filed for divorce and my husband went to live with one of his daughter leaving me alone for the first time in decades. I went online and found a man named brad gates who was talking about technique in called, also called the emotional freedom technique for eft. And in the book i take you with me on the path i took towards self empowerment. Using calving as myprimary means of emotional emancipation. Tapping is a way to release trapped emotions by tapping with your fingertips on certain meridian points that are based on acupuncture system which is thousands of years old. I started using it on myself with only a video as a guide. And when i began to experience the benefits of it , how i began to feel more capable, less traps and less evenly easily triggered by things. I knew i had landed on something powerful. To me that twists and spirals on the cover of the book suggest that the path to self empowerment is not linear. And in the book i detail just how long and winding road was for me. But i wrote the book because i believe that by learning from my journey other people can shorten their own. And the tool that i use had to be powerful. Because at that point i had personal experience with childhood sexual abuse, bullying, raised by a mother with a cultlikementality. Living in the Public Housing projects, olistening to gunshots at night. Being the child of e an alcoholic , single teenage parent, incarceration, eviction. Unemployment, underemployment, living on welfare. Job stress, workingtwo jobs just to make it. Divorced, homelessness, physical health problems, domestic violence, depression , suicidal thoughts and ptsd. If something could set me free i knew it could help a lot of people. But i didnt want to just be preaching to the choir. I wanted to talk to people who might disagree with my perspective. People who might have little to no concern or no mmempathy for someone who hadpecommitted a crime and especially a Violent Crime which might have seemed unprovoked. I wanted to talk to people in hr and to decisionmakers in business. Like me many restored citizens had earned College Degrees while in prison and yet when they come home there assumed to be capable only of entrylevel positions that dont pay enough for them to be independent and this is a major contributing factor to recidivism. I wanted to have a discussion about why restored citizens need to be incorporated into the workforce at the level at which they are actually qualified and salaries where they could meet their own needs and get their children out of foster care and take care of them. That is why i was so honored when the president and ceo of the society for Human Resource management endorse my book and i like toread you what you wrote. He said while ive long been a proponent of Second Chance initiatives, lisa forbes memoir forced me to rethink how best to impact change. Lisa argues that while jobs are indeed a major obstacle to returning citizens, addressing the underlying r trauma that leaves so many in the criminal Justice System should be at the realcore of our work at the society. Her gripping and at times graphic story of her trials, tribulations and triumphs left me inspired. Like him and like many of you i do support criminal Justice Reform but i will also tell you that it would not have helped me. And it would not have helped the masses of people like me whose primary path to the prison door was paved with unprocessed pain and trauma. As a society we will never end mass incarceration and mass recidivism until we acknowledge and address the role that trauma plays in it. But i dont apologize for saying that social reform without personal responsibility is a pipe pedream. I could not see myself as having the authority to confront society if i hadnt confronted myself. So id like to share withouyou how i describe that in oothe book. Ideals deeply into my emotions. It felt dangerous, tricky. The mass of resentment, the profound bitterness. The colossal rage. The feelings of unfairness andinjustice. Could i handle it . For years i had rejected my emotions and build walls around myself. I pretended i didnt have any feelings. If they surfaced, i buried them. I was number. Moving away had not fixed my life. I had taken my feelings with me and projected their personalities on to strangers. So one of the hardest things i ever did was to consider despite how traumatic my own life had been how did my behavior look from other peoples point of view. How had it affected other people and particularly James Langston. Pl this ultimately is how i came to terms with that. On a cold chicago day i had plunged a kitchen knife into James Langstons chest. Why did i do that. James had given me a daughter, mercedes. He had promised to marry me and buy me a ring. Then he married another woman and didnt tell me. I had endured years of m bullying, sexual abuse, religious ostracism. My heart had taken a terrible beating but i knew that i could never heal myself if i stood over James Langstons grave and focused solely on my own pain. Yet what was i supposed to do now. A murder, undoubtedly James Langston died for the sins of others. My anger at the world did not start with james. It started with my family. My mother rejected me long before james did. My mother brother molested me for years, making me feel powerless and used. James was a stand in for people he had never met. Not that he didnt abuse me to. I was 17 when i met him. He was 23. I had read romance novels but have never been on a date. He toyed with me, lied to me and abandons me. Still, he owned a home and took care of his mother until she died. He shared his home with his older sister and was a father figure to his nephew. The truth was James Langston was far from a bad person. He was in many ways the good man and there was no way that my tellinghim was justified. Could i tap that away . Ultimately i decided that it wasnt about justifying my crime. It was about understanding it. And it was about making sure that i would never react in the same way again. All long time ago someone told me i should never talk about a problem without suggesting asolution. So my book i can take it from here, a memoir of trauma, prison and self empowerment is my story but in many ways it is the story of millions of other people and it is the thread woven thr