News

From blogs to press releases to newsletters, and Freedom Reads in the media to other news of interest, stay up to date with Freedom Reads.

Founder's Take: Seeing Your Reflection in a Sentence

By Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder & CEO, Freedom Reads

Everyone who has ever been given a state number has a story of a cell door closing. And too often the stories that make it out from behind those closed cell doors are of sorrow. The sorrow of so many become the substance of films and of folklore, of the narratives of men like Malcolm X or Nathan McCall or Petey Greene or Merle Haggard or a half‑a‑dozen men in Bruce Springsteen songs. So many of us with debts no honest man can pay. I think of Susan Burton or Angela Davis or the many women I’ve met as I’ve walked back into prisons, their names less well known, but their struggles no less visceral. And yet, the thing less known than all those stories is how often an open book leads to shifting someone’s life—even for simply the span of time it takes to get from that first page to the last.

Continue Reading

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)