Submerged: A Memoir on Healing from Abuse While Navigating a Lifetime of Imprisonment

Fearless honesty. Deep despair. Resilient discovery. Profound forgiveness. Revolutionary hope and liberation.

Submerged is the story of one woman's journey from a nightmare of childhood sexual abuse through a world of drug gangs and murder to prison and, ultimately, personal redemption through faith and a dedication to helping others.

This is Sheena King's story, a raw, harrowing memoir anchored in revolutionary and transformative love. It is, at the same time, a story shared by tens of thousands of women, especially women of color who are incarcerated as the result of events that began with abuse by someone who should have been there to protect and nurture them.

During her years in prison, Sheena found the strength to free herself through the process of helping countless other victims of childhood abuse. Now she offers her memoir with the express hope that it will help many more.

As Rikeyah Lindsay of the Abolitionist Law Center writes in her foreword, “This book shows that we must take our collective healing and liberation seriously, interrogating the root causes and demanding accountability not only for ourselves but also for the systems that create the conditions for so much harm to occur.” With Lindsay's foreword and an introduction by Victoria Law, Submerged offers essential insights for all who want to understand and participate in the growing movement for alternatives to incarceration.

In her own introduction Sheena King writes: “I’ve told my story. Now tell yours. It will free you.”

Praise

“Submerged is a tidal wave that will leave you feeling as if you are drowning only to provide a lifeline to stable ground. Sheena King painstakingly notes how sexual predators and family violence deepen the wells of despair and expand violence and childhood trauma. Her memoir notes the casualties of damaged children, women, and men and family members. King and the poets who contribute to this important text offer a raw record of memory, shame and rage. They ask for and offer accountability. Their caretaking as healers acknowledges vulnerabilities and violations of incarcerated women; this author and her community aids and educates everyone with this powerful book of rage and sorrow, death, and redemption. Anchored in revolutionary and transformative love, Submerged also allows us to swim to shore with our souls intact.”
—Joy James, author of In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love and New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner

"Powerful. A moving and heartbreaking tale of innocence lost, two lives destroyed, and one woman's incredible journey to redemption behind prison walls."
—Tammy Mal, author of Convenient Suspect and Little Girl Lost

"Submerged proves that while you can sink to the depths, you can also rise back up through the power of testimony. Searing, it hurts, yet it is so worth it to read. Sheena King’s book is going to help a lot of people."
—Jennifer Black, coeditor of Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-prison Reader

“Throughout this spirited, harrowing, and unflinching memoir, Sheena King honors us with her personal saga, in vivid prose and poetry, describing a gifted woman who endured hellish childhood sexual trauma and deprivation, resulting in actions that derailed her life and landed her in prison—yet which also led her, through group therapies and brave introspection, to a path of transformational knowledge, faith, resilience, love, and self-redemption. A testament to recovery from terrible abuses, she offers this book in a heartfelt desire to assist others in similar need of healing. Written with impressive narrative skill, Submerged will challenge you, haunt you, and—by the very fact that Sheena King managed against formidable odds to create this powerful memoir—bolster your faith that a person can not only survive the unsurvivable but triumph."
—Rev. Steve Kanji Ruhl, M.Div., author of the award-winning memoir Appalachian Zen

“Sheena King's Submerged is unflinchingly honest, hard to read and impossible to look away from. King's story brings the abuse to prison pipeline to life, describing how the horror of child sexual abuse ultimately led to the very different horror of incarceration. Just as importantly, though, Submerged highlights how much King and the women she is incarcerated with have learned, grown, and could offer to society now, if only we are willing to see them for who they are rather than what they were convicted of.”
—Leigh Goodmark, author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism.

"Sheena's way of creatively sharing her story with us is inspiring. The truth, challenge and triumph all entwined, keeps the reader engrossed in the storyline and makes us seek more. She was meant to be a writer. Cheers to what's next!"
—Terri Harper, inmate serving a life sentence at SCI Muncy in Pennsylvania and editor of The Movement magazine

“It is hard to believe that one life story can encapsule both deep pain and profound love: sometimes simultaneously. In fact, some may believe it is impossible that strength and redemption can grow and even flourish from degradation and abuse. Indeed, it may the case that only survivors of horrific violence and people living under the vicious control of the carceral state (and their advocates) can really understand what gender violence and mass criminalization means. But if there is any possibility, then Ms. King’s memoir Submerged offers us the best hope for building a movement of understanding and resistance. Not uncomplicated or uncontroversial, the book is as painful as it is inspiring and as troubling as it is hopeful. But the message is clear: survivors’ stories told through personal accounts and poems will not only teach us but lead us to work for justice and freedom like we have never worked before. For that, I am both moved and grateful.”
—Beth Ritchie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation; and coauthor of Abolition. Feminism

“By narrating her endurance and survival of childhood sexual abuse in Submerged, Sheena King beams twin lights: the harsh light of truth and the warming light that comes when trauma is no longer hidden in darkness but is seen, shared, and in the process of being healed. Submerged is a memoir of resilience, love, and the enduring will to fight one’s way to the surface and breathe.”
—K.A. Hays, author of Windthrow and associate professor of creative writing, Bucknell University

“Most of us are careful to avoid painful memories, but Sheena King faces the piercing traumas of her life with clear-eyed and heartbreaking honesty. In Submerged she writes poignantly and powerfully about the soul-crushing experiences of her youth—but also about her imprisonment, her growth and change, and her discovery of deep and lasting spirituality and love. Hers is a hard-earned peace, and we, as readers, are the beneficiaries of her journey to healing and hope. She has given us an unforgettable account of despair and discovery, forgiveness and hope.”
—Joyce Hinnefeld, emerita professor of English at Moravian University, program facilitator at Shining Light, author of The Dime Museum

“With fearless honesty, Sheena King plunges us into the darkness of her childhood sexual abuse and shows us how soul-crushing and hidden trauma morphs a life of promise into a life sentence at the Muncy State Prison housing women in Central Pennsylvania. With humility and abiding faith, she recounts her experiences of deep personal evolution, healing, and love in a place antithetical to these pursuits, and her commitment to channel her strength and wisdom into helping others heal. Submerged weaves poetry and prose into a provocative narrative, witnessing how courage and emotional fortitude can dispel the darkest shadows and restore the light.”
—Jennifer Hwozdek, teaching artist, Life Out Loud, a trauma-informed storytelling program serving incarcerated women and codirector, Ridgelines Language Arts

About the Contributors

Sheena King is presently serving a life sentence at SCI Muncy in Muncy, PA, where she is an advocate for incarcerated women, with degrees in religious studies and Christian counseling. She is the published author of a book of poems and journal entries titled Unheard Souls and 3Sum. Her poems and essays have been published in journals including Let's Get Free, Daughters, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Peace and Justice Newspaper, Prison Health News, Centers for Wisdom, and Tenacious. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including International Library of Poetry, and Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States.

Rikeyah Lindsay is healing justice organizer for Straight Ahead, the 501(c)(4) arm of the Abolitionist Law Center.

Victoria Law is a freelance journalist and author focused on incarceration, gender, and resistance. Her books include Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, and Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration.

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