The entrance to the Maximum Security Men’s Unit was cold and echoey. The incessant clanging of metal doors reverberated off the cinderblock walls and rattled my self-confidence. Carrying only a notebook, golf pencil, and ten copies of a Mary Oliver poem, I wormed my way through the interior corridors of the notorious Texas jail and arrived at the front of a makeshift classroom ready to teach my first creative writing class.After each inmate was searched by guards outside the door, they filed into the room dressed in black and white striped jumpsuits. They were white, black, and brown, mostly from poor neighborhoods, with varying degrees of education. No one had stepped foot on a blade of grass in months.I’ll admit - I was intimidated. Naive, too. Looking around the room, I suddenly felt that I’d made a horrible mistake. I had nothing to teach these people. They would find nothing to relate to in the poem I’d chosen. I was wasting their time. I didn’t know what I was doing.After a few awkward minutes Eric, a heavyset 30-something covered in greening tattoos, spoke up. “Miss, I love poetry.”“You do?” I asked. “What kind of poetry?”“I dunno,” he said. “I just like to write poetry.” A few of the other men nodded. Frank, jittery in the front row, smiled.“Yeah, do you have any books we can read?” he said. “The library here sucks. And, I got a lot of time to read.”We spent the next eight weeks together reading poems, writing personal essays, and talking about our lives. To celebrate the completion of our first anthology, I brought in a giant bag of Doritos to be divided up among the class. When my first student was published online, we passed around strawberry Starbursts. Breaking the “no food in class” rule bought me a lot of trust with my students who took increasingly bold risks in their writing.In one of our last sessions before the winter break, I remember Eric timidly walking to the front of the room with a crumpled piece of notebook paper in his hand. Though he was over 6’ tall with biceps the size of grapefruits, I saw his hand tremble. He shared the first of many poems grieving the loss of his brother. It was the beginning of my five-year journey teaching creative writing inside the incarceration system.