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Founder's Take: What Matters Most

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO

I remember my first holiday meal in prison. I’d just turned eighteen-years-old a few weeks before, my second of eight birthdays Inside. I was at Southampton Correctional Center in Capron, Virginia. There are still a lot of folks I remember who would have been in the chow hall that day, some I still talk to. Fats, Star, Divine, Smoke. That dinner, they served Cornish hens. I didn’t know what that was then but knew it was delicious. Later found out these hens are juvenile chickens particularly tender for eating.

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The Past's Presence: Jesmyn Ward

In today’s episode, Jesmyn Ward reads from her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is at once a bildungsroman, a ghost story, an epic, and a road novel. In portraying the suck of Parchman Prison on the generations of one Mississippi family, Ward deftly explores how the real threat of incarceration haunts these psyches and, in turn, these familial relationships. In this moving conversation, Ward reflects on living with grief, on listening for communications from beyond our immediate reality, and on the central commitments of her work: to restore agency to the kinds of characters too often denied a voice—and to grant acceptance to the ones harder to forgive. (July 26, 2021)