Founder's Take: Freedom Begins with a Book
This month, as a team, we returned to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the Legacy Sites. And on this return, we were bringing our new expanded team. We had folks with us who’d not been permitted to go because of probation issues last year and folks who weren’t on our team then. We had family members with us. And we understood that returning to Montgomery, to the site of so many historic struggles for civil rights, was going to be about the hard work of always rejoicing, even when confronted with sorrow.
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Reginald Dwayne Betts discusses his new collection of poems, 'Doggerel'
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts discussed his latest collection of poetry, Doggerel, on NPR's Morning Edition with Michel Martin.
Reginald Betts Has Proven Life Can Be Grand Post-Prison
LEVEL writes about the 20th anniversary of Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts' release from prison and his latest book of poetry, Doggerel.
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.”
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February 2025 Newsletter
Freedom Begins with a Book
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)