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Meet The Team: Library Production Associate Michael Byrd

By Mobolaji Otuyelu, Creative Research Associate at Freedom Reads
Freedom Reads Library Production Assistant Michael Byrd.

Michael Byrd had just come home after spending 17 years in prison and didn’t even have an ID. Then he was introduced to the team at Freedom Reads through a reentry program called Emerge. In January 2024, he joined the team as a Library Production Assistant assembling and building bookcases, “and going into prisons to open Freedom Libraries.” But that was just the beginning.

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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)