Author Chris Young

Registration for this event is FREE . VIP tickets are also available for purchase.

Each VIP ticket ($30+fees) includes:

• A copy of The Wound Is Where the Light Enters

• VIP seating at the event

• Signing line priority

• A donation to the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation

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About the author:

Chris Young is a consultant, author, and public speaker whose life and work speak to the power of choice, resilience, and the mind. Raised in Clarksville, Tennessee, he came of age in a community shaped by severe poverty, instability, and limited opportunity. At 22, he was sentenced to two life terms without parole under outdated federal drug laws, and served more than a decade in prison. Determined not to let a life sentence confine his mind, he educated himself across disciplines from philosophy and history to economics, politics, and quantum physics, and taught himself to code without a computer.

His case drew national attention after the federal judge who sentenced him resigned his lifetime appointment to the bench to fight for his freedom. In 2021, Young was granted executive clemency. Since his release, he has earned a degree in economics and public policy from Southern Methodist University and founded Coherence Consulting, a strategic advisory firm advising organizations on policy, technology, and societal impact. His story has been featured by CNN, PBS's Amanpour and Company , CBS News, BBC, and Variety , among others.

The Wound Is Where the Light Enters is the inspiring memoir of a brilliant young man who, sentenced to life in prison, refused to surrender his future—a story so powerful that it transformed even the judge who handed down the sentence.

If our world were more just, Chris Young would have been crossing a stage at college graduation at the age of 22. Instead, he was marched into a maximum-security federal prison, facing life under mandatory drug sentencing laws. Like far too many young Black men from his neighborhood in Clarksville, Tennessee, this was where his story was supposed to end.

But one day in the prison library, a book caught his eye: an encyclopedia. As he began to turn the pages, Chris felt himself transported. Knowledge became a portal. He began to confront the nihilism around him, the trauma of his past, and the cruelty of a system determined to confine him. From the library, his cell, and even solitary confinement, Chris built an education from scratch, studying philosophy, art, anthropology, history, physics, and politics. He learned to analyze the stock market and taught himself how to code without a computer. He trained his mind—and refused to let prison dictate the limits of his imagination. At his sentencing hearing, Chris gave such a moving speech that the judge resigned from his lifetime appointment to the bench and fought to free him.

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