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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Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts was quoted in the Los Angeles Times' feature on the Cave Canem poetry retreat, and its 30th anniversary.
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Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts talked books he loves, Freedom Reads, and his new poetry collection, Doggerel, in The New York Times' "By the Book" series.
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)