Kites from the Inside: The Power of Letters
In October, Freedom Reads received over 100 letters from people who are incarcerated, our first time crossing this milestone. For someone like me, who spent seven days short of 30 years in prison, sleeping in 11 different facilities across two states, this milestone is deeply personal. I know firsthand the power of a letter, the way it can pierce through the isolation and remind someone Inside that they are still seen, still valued, still connected to the outside world…still somebody.
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Fifteen Questions: Reginald Dwayne Betts on Vulnerability, Collective Memory, and Freedom Reads
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts spoke with Fifteen Minutes, the magazine of the Harvard Crimson, about literature, poetry, prison, and freedom.
The power of books in prison with poet Reginald Dwayne Betts
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts sat down with Connecticut Public Radio's Khalilah Brown-Dean for the Disrupted podcast. Plus, the podcast visited Freedom Reads headquarters to speak with the Freedom Reads team about Freedom Libraries, the power of books, and returning to prisons.
Why a Cellmate is Not like a Roommate
“The prison is like an isolated town with nowhere to go. And the cell is our whole house,” Biktor B. writes, adding that this “house” is shared by complete and often incompatible strangers, who have next to nothing in common.
What Is it Like to Live in a Halfway House?
Kashawn Taylor writes about the expectations and realities of living in a halfway house after leaving prison, noting “it feels like freedom, with an asterisk.”
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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)