Reginald Dwayne Betts - Freedom Reads
When: 7pm - Nov 9, 2023
Where: 2452 Knauss Hall
Who: Reginald Dwayne Betts
What: "Freedom Reads"
Please join us for an evening with Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet, lawyer, MacArthur Fellow and Exective Director of Freedom Reads.
Freedom Reads aims to place millions of books into prisons, one 500-book Freedom Library at a time, opened in every prison dormitory and housing unit in the United States. The Freedom Library and his other literary initiatives support the efforts of people in prison to imagine new possibilities for their lives.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country.
For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of paper-making.
In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.