William Blake is a writer serving a life sentence in the New York state prison system. Blake's writing has been published on Solitary Watch, including his essay "A Sentence Worse Than Death," which went viral with more than half a million hits on the original page alone. The essay has since been reprinted and translated into several languages, and is the lead essay in the 2016 book Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement. Blake spent 34 years in solitary confinement and was featured in a NY Focus article after his release back into general population.