The W. D. Harris Literary Works Story

  Walter Dion Harris was born in Omaha, Nebraska in the early 1970's. Mr. Harris was raised, and experienced his formative years in the Southside Terrace Project units of South Omaha. 

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  As a youth, Mr. Harris witnessed crime and poverty, compounded by rampant drug abuse and violence in his own family and community. Many of those experiences, recounted in his literature and music.

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During the 1980's, Harris was exposed to the crack epidemic that ravished numerous Black communities during that era, and the subsequent gang culture produced by government policies of America. 

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Those policies and practices ultimately culminated in the incarceration of Mr. Harris and the majority of his peers.

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  Contrary and contradictory to the beliefs and sweeping indictments against marginalized communities across America, this work does not glorify or condone the works or behaviors depicted or conveyed, but rather symbolizes the struggle unfathomable numbers of Black communities have faced.

  This work represents the voices that the system didn't or wouldn't care about. This work is for those the system forgot... But Walter Dion Harris didn't...

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Mr. Harris' story 

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By M. R. Starks