Keri Blakinger on the Dungeons & Dragons Players on Death Row

Your Fellows project will be a book about Dungeons & Dragons players on death row. You wrote about these players in a Pulitzer-finalist piece for the New York Times Magazine in 2023, why did you decide to expand that story into a book?

For years as I reported the story, my friends kept telling me I should expand it into a book. It wasn’t until after the piece came out that I really saw the path to do that, when I started to realize how much I’d had to leave out—and how many other storylines I’d like to share with readers. Some of those are stories about Billy and Tony, because there’s a lot about them and their world that I didn’t get to tell. But some of those stories are about my experience covering death row and the other men I’ve met there.

What are the unique challenges in reporting a story like this?

The biggest challenge is the prison system—or, specifically, the fact that my main “characters” are all in it. The restrictions around prison communication and interviewing make the logistics of long-form reporting on people there incredibly difficult. For instance, the man whose story is most central to the book is on Texas death row, so I can only visit him for one hour, once every 90 days. I couldn’t visit him at all during the pandemic, and last year there was a six-month period where prison officials blocked me from seeing him. Prison rules bar me from receiving phone calls from him, and typically my only recourse is to message him through the monitored, censored third-party e-messaging system, the functionality of which leaves a lot to be desired. All of that makes it really tough to get the kind of access I actually want.

The book will address wrongful convictions, shoddy forensics, and other problems with capital punishment generally. Do you have an ideal reader in mind? A policymaker or leader who you hope reads it?

Aside from policymakers and leaders, the other possibility with this book that really excites me is that it has the potential to make the criminal legal system interesting to a demographic of readers I don’t generally reach: tabletop role-playing gamers. I didn’t realize quite how much the story at the center of this book would resonate with them, or move them to think about prisoners differently, until I read the comments on the New York Times Magazine story that this book is based on.

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