Founder's Take: The Language of Hope
Dear Reader,
Prison teaches you what it means to be alone and what it means to lean on people who care about you. Inside, we built bonds over fleeting moments, breaking bread over meals, turning books we read into opportunities to see each other more clearly. And we stayed inventing a language of hope: calling letters kites, calling studying doing the math, remembering that one day you’d only have one day and a wake up left. When my confession announced me a convict, when the judge pronounced my sentence, I walked into a cell and called myself a writer. Sometimes it’s just a word that you hold onto until it becomes freedom.
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John Himmelman, Reginald Dwayne Betts take a populist approach to poetry in new books
Doggerel, the latest book of poetry by Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, is featured on NPR's Book of the Day podcast.
A Showcase for Formerly Incarcerated Artists Grows in Brooklyn
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts' books will be displayed in the Center for Art and Advocacy's new public exhibition and education space.
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.”
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)