What Books Mean for the Soul
My first day at Freedom Reads, I teared up upon walking through the front door. Greeting me in the middle of the open space, beckoning me to fully step into the wooden warmth decorating the walls and floor was the free-floating Freedom Library, filled to the brim with books familiar and new. I had never been in such close proximity to something so beautiful that I could actually touch. The hundreds of books that sat upon those curving shelves left me speechless, and the bookworm in me who grew up with limited access to books felt genuinely giddy at seeing so many books I could pick out at any time and read.
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From behind bars, to passing the bar
ABA Journal writes about Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts' journey from prison to Yale Law School.
Dwayne Betts Brings One-Man Show, ‘Felon: An American Washi Tale,’ to NU Chicago
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts brings his solo show, FELON: An American Washi Tale, to Northwestern University’s Abbott Hall this week.
Life Inside, Remixed: An Incarcerated Artist Learns to Paint through the Chaos of Prison
“Painting requires a clear mind,” explained Memo, Rafael Rodriguez’s cellmate. In this animated essay, Rodriguez talks about how oil painting helped him realize that art mimics life, and so he poured his emotions into art.
When Kittens Came to My Prison, I Had Not Petted One in 15 Years
Cameron Terhune writes about how a litter of kittens changed his experience at a California prison.
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October 2024 Newsletter
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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)