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Kristen Martin

Kristen Martin’s narrative nonfiction book The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow will be published by Bold Type Books in January 2025. She has written for the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She tweets @kwistent.

A barbed-wire oval frames a victim of the NY Department of Corrections. Carrying a shovel on his shoulder, he walks across the grass toward a dead tree. A ghost watches him from a crumbling building.

Abolishing the Prison of the Dead

To get to Hart Island, a hundred-acre sliver of land in the Long Island Sound, you must first make your way to City Island, a slightly larger sliver of land off the coast of the Bronx. City Island is a small community that feels more Long Island than Bronx. Its streets are lined ...