Student rewrites his story

Lilly Kujawski
Editor

For Cozine A. Welch, Jr., a student studying Spanish at WCC, it took prison to realize his true potential and capabilities as a writer.

When Welch was 17, he entered the criminal justice system for his involvement in an altercation that ended with him getting shot and another man killed. During the 20 years Welch was incarcerated, he earned an associate’s degree in business management. He also worked as a legal writer to aid other prisoners in their appeals, participated in music programs and became the most published poet in the University of Michigan Prison Creative Arts Project’s “Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing” journal.

Growing up, Welch knew America as the land of opportunity, but those opportunities didn’t seem attainable for him or others like him.

“I knew, yeah, sure, I could be a doctor, I could be an engineer, but I ain’t seen one that looked like me,” he said. “Just because it’s a possibility doesn’t make it a probability.”

When one of his poems was accepted into the PCAP literary review, everything changed.

“Each person has to have a moment where that shift is made and they realize, ‘oh, I can do something else,’ and that can only happen if they’re exposed to it,” Welch said. “I never thought I could be a writer until the University of Michigan was like, ‘hey, your writing’s pretty good’ and they published me.”

Even so, Welch worried he’d been accepted on a fluke. He was fearful he had only written one good poem, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was a good writer. So, he submitted another poem the next year. This time, when it was accepted, he was then asked to write the introduction for the book. Soon, Welch found that the review had given him a reason to write.

Welch continued to submit his poetry to the PCAP literary review. His work was ultimately included in nine out of the 10 yearly issues published during his incarceration.

For Welch, surviving in prison, an environment permeated with aggression and fear, meant numbing the everyday realities of where he was. Writing became an important way for him to deal with his surroundings and the anxiety and traumas he experienced—including the deaths of his grandmother and his mother, which happened while he was in prison.

“When I write, I have to think about where I am in space, how it feels, what I see,” Welch said. “I can’t leave those walls up.”

The more he processed his realities through writing, the better he felt. He considered those periods of time he spent writing to be therapy sessions.

Beyond bars

During his incarceration, Welch also participated in a program called Poets Beyond Bars Summer Writing Intensive for Incarcerated Writers, a pilot project founded by Ann Arbor poet Franny Choi and Albion College professor and “Michigan Quarterly Review” managing editor H.R. Webster, in association with PCAP. The program paired U of M MFA students with incarcerated writers for a pen pal-style exchange of poetry and feedback on each other’s writing.

“To me, the dopest part was that I was told that my writing and my understanding of poetry was good enough to where I could critique someone who was doing this scholastically,” Welch said.

For Welch, receiving critiques was an amazing experience. His partner for the project was Kyle Hunt, an English MFA student and graduate student instructor at U of M.

“They gave us a Google doc of poets we could potentially work with and then had us choose, and Cozine was at the very top of my list,” Hunt said. “His poems immediately stuck out to me.”

Welch and Hunt immediately connected during their correspondence, which took place over a four-month period in the summer 2017.

“The only expectation was to send the poems to each other, and also feedback, but then Cozine and I, I think, went above and beyond, and really sent each other long, detailed letters,” Hunt said. “We hit it off quickly.”

The two bonded over their sense of humor and their shared interest in meditation practice. Hunt described Welch’s poetry as “very generous to the reader,” “energetic” and “in-your-face.”

“It was strange for us to say in, like, the first letter that we felt lucky to have been connected with each other, that seems fast in terms of letter corresponding, but I really meant it and I think he did, too,” Hunt added. “There’s a reason for that, I don’t feel drawn to people that quickly unless they’re very kind, and Cozine is a very kind person.”

After Welch was released from prison in September 2017, he reached out to Hunt so the two could meet in person.

On the outside

Since his release, Welch has worked to enable healing experiences similar to his in other prisoners through the creative arts. He now fills the position of managing editor for the “Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing,” as well as co-teaching two classes related to restorative justice in prisons at U of M.

Welch, who also runs a re-entry workshop for newly-released prisoners on digital literacy, said he has a “bad habit of doing too much.” Much of that stems from an urgency to make up for time lost while he was incarcerated.

“I feel like I have to do five times more than what the average person does because I’m so far behind,” he said. “In a lot of ways I’m grown, but I still feel like I’m young because there’s a lot of experiences I haven’t had, that I’m having now as an adult.”

Returning to life outside of prison was something for which Welch was unprepared, especially without his mother and grandmother to come home to.

Fitting in with his peers can be difficult at times for Welch, because in many aspects his experiences have pushed him to grow beyond other people his age, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of growing he hasn’t had the opportunity to do.

“You have to have the experience,” Welch said. “Knowledge is knowing something, but the only way to get to understanding is through wisdom, and wisdom means you have to do the thing; you have to apply it.”

“With the students I’m teaching, right, I wonder if the reason I get through to them so well is because in a lot of ways I’m still their age,” Welch said. “In a lot of ways, we’re experiencing some of the same stuff for the first time.”

As much as Welch can relate to his students and understand their perspective, he still finds when he is sitting in class as a student himself there’s a disconnect between him and classmates. Substantially older than most of the other students, at times he feels he doesn’t quite belong.

Learning to fit in with peers and trying to make sense of life “outside” after spending so much time away, is one of the biggest adjustments Welch has faced since his release. Some intrinsic truths most people take for granted are considered unchartered territory for Welch.

“One thing that’s strange about prison is you get used to the idea of people being temporary,” Welch said. “You can’t really know someone for any length of time determined by you.”

“The idea that I could know somebody for a long time is an idea that I only recently tried to really understand what that could be like,” Welch said. “I’ve got friends now that I could theoretically know for the rest of my life. And then it becomes, well, who do you keep in that rest-of-your-life circle?”

Currently, Welch is at WCC working on a foreign-language prerequisite before transferring to the University of Michigan this fall.

In addition to being a student and working full-time, Welch continues to write poetry and has more recently been published in literary journals, including the “Michigan Quarterly Review” and “Plough.”

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