Founder's Take: What Poetry Might Offer
At the end of James Wright’s poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” as he writes about noticing the bronze butterfly, a leaf in green shadow, as he writes about the cowbells, and sunlight between two pines, the golden stones that were once horse droppings, as he writes about the chicken hawk, I’m always utterly gobsmacked by his conclusion: I have wasted my life. And it’s such a startling end to the poem that it’s haunted me for a decade. I’m forty-four years old and watched my first sunrise less than a month ago, and now I am no more than a few hours away from when I was lying in a hammock at someone’s farm, staring at a duck with her ducklings that barely rise above the growing grass, and again I am weeping, and exhausted, and willing to admit that I have not wasted my life.
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A literary prize is awarded by prison inmates. This Arizona woman was on the judging committee
Crystal “Alex” Capilla, 2024 Inside Literary Prize judge and member of the 2025 Inside Literary Prize Selection Committee, spoke to KJZZ Phoenix from ASPC - Perryville in Arizona about what it meant to serve as a judge for last year's Prize and about this year's shortlisted titles.
Our Favorite Books for Every Type of Mom
Doggerel, the latest collection of poetry from Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, is featured in The New York Times' recommendations on books for Mother's Day.
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)