Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads.

At sixteen, he confessed to an armed carjacking and was sentenced to nine years in adult prison. He discovered poetry and the law in a cell, and those discoveries have shaped everything since. Across two decades, his work has been one long inquiry into how a sixteen-year-old ends up in prison and what it takes to come home—an inquiry he has pursued through poetry, memoir, theater, photography, printmaking, and film.

Betts is the author of six books, including the memoir A Question of Freedom, winner of an NAACP Image Award, and most recently Doggerel (W.W. Norton, 2025). A Question of Freedom is a prison memoir that begins with Betts's arrest and ends as he walks out of prison's gates. His forthcoming memoir, Off the Cuff, begins the day he was released and navigates his first twenty years out of prison.

Out of a desire to connect more intimately with an audience, he created Felon: An American Washi Tale, a solo theater work made in collaboration with director Elise Thoron and a distinguished design team. The work transforms the story of what it means to be a felon into a meditation on what it means to be American. It has been performed in prisons and on major stages, including San Quentin and the Perelman Performing Arts Center. His exploration of these themes continues in the film March Forth, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival.

His visual art practice is an extension of his literary inquiry. While writing an essay about the poet and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis, Betts began shooting black-and-white street photography, using the camera as a new lens on the world he has documented for years. As a printmaker, his collaboration with Titus Kaphar, Redaction, was exhibited at MoMA and acquired by Yale Law School. In a subsequent collaboration with Ruth Lingen, he transformed the clothing of friends serving lengthy prison sentences into handmade paper for prints now held in the collections of Brown University, the Morgan Library, and Smith College.

After law school, Betts began writing for The New York Times Magazine, where he has served as a poetry editor and a contributor exploring subjects ranging from Kamala Harris to Tariq Trotter. His essay “Getting Out,” an account of his journey from jail to Yale, won the 2019 National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism. His most recent work, “A Gun Derailed My Childhood. As an Adult, I Found Relief at the Range,” continues a career-long examination of the impact of guns on the American landscape.

A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Betts has held fellowships at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, New America, and the Aspen Institute. He serves on Connecticut's Criminal Justice Commission and is an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School, where he earned his J.D.
Betts launched Freedom Reads with a $5.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. The organization is the only one in the country dedicated to opening libraries inside prison cellblocks. Each Freedom Library is handcrafted, often by people who have served time themselves, and placed within arm’s reach of the people it serves. Betts founded it on a simple conviction: freedom begins with a book.