Founder's Take: Staking My Life on Books
For years I’ve had a gripe with the ACLU. During the winter of 1998, the same winter that I became a poet, my friend Markeese Turnage and I wrote a letter to the ACLU asking for legal help. Keese had been sentenced to more than sixty years in prison. He didn’t have a rape, murder, or robbery conviction. Instead, he’d wrangled an officer’s gun from him and attempted to turn it on himself. The gun never went off. No one was hurt. He was 17 years old. For Christmas that year, the ACLU sent us a form letter back. And today, Keese is still incarcerated. I’d used his story to get myself admitted to Yale Law School; I’d used his story to get him a lawyer once I was a graduate of the same. And still, years later, he is inside, as loss after loss accumulates.
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Shelf Life: Rachel Kushner
Author Rachel Kushner spoke with Elle about her book picks for every occasion, and her support of Freedom Reads.
Books Saved Reginald Dwayne Betts In Prison – Now, He’s Behind The Literature Prize Voted On By Incarcerated Readers
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwyane Betts on the impact of books in prison, founding Freedom Reads, and launching the inaugural Inside Literary Prize.
Take a Tour of the Beehives in My Oregon Prison
Writer Phillip Luna, incarcerated inside Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, shares about facilitating the selective beekeeping program at the prison.
The Strange Twist in Coping with My Father’s Death from Behind Bars
Jeremy Moss poignantly captures what it is like to lose a loved one during a long incarceration, a loss that is often felt and mourned even prior to a loved one’s actual death–in the sense that incarceration separates people from one another.
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August 2024 Newsletter
Staking My Life on Books
Latest Episode
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)