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For years I’ve had a gripe with the ACLU. During the winter of 1998, the same winter that I became a poet, my friend Markeese Turnage and I wrote a letter to the ACLU asking for legal help. Keese had been sentenced to more than sixty years in prison. He didn’t have a rape, murder, or robbery conviction. Instead, he’d wrangled an officer’s gun from him and attempted to turn it on himself. The gun never went off. No one was hurt. He was 17 years old. For Christmas that year, the ACLU sent us a form letter back. And today, Keese is still incarcerated. I’d used his story to get myself admitted to Yale Law School; I’d used his story to get him a lawyer once I was a graduate of the same. And still, years later, he is inside, as loss after loss accumulates.

This story was published in partnership with Prison Journalism Project, a national nonprofit organization which trains incarcerated writers in journalism and publishes their work. Sign up for PJP’s newsletter, follow them on Instagram or connect with them on LinkedIn.

This is what they don’t tell you: men and women, people in prison, laugh. They will not say that we get wise, make discoveries, struggle with more than the inexorable weight of time. And Freedom Reads celebrates that. The reasons for this celebration, at least for me, have become most relevant these days – when the losses of the world feel innumerable and remind me of time marking days off a calendar that seemed would last forever.

The role I play here at Freedom Reads gives me the ability to see both the front-end and the back-end results of the great work we do at Freedom Reads. My primary job is to make sure the handcrafted furniture we create here at Freedom Reads Headquarters in Connecticut is put together properly, and we build enough units each day to meet the demand of our efforts to place these Freedom Libraries into cellblocks at correctional facilities all over the country. 

This summer, Freedom Reads welcomed five interns to the team, marking the second year of Freedom Reads' internship program. Over the course of eight weeks, interns worked with the Freedom Reads Team on projects that aligned with their unique interests and skills: everything from automating databases to researching and writing impact reports to producing video content for social media. Read on to hear directly from the interns about their experience working with Freedom Reads and what they will take away from their time here.

It was all a dream. Or not a dream, but a fantasy, this belief that people would get behind the idea of the Freedom Library. The Freedom Library, which, at its root, is simply the notion that beauty and literature matter. That nature matters. That incarceration should not deprive people of these things. To put this all in another way, I’ll say that I was thinking like they thought with the Field of Dreams, that is: If you build it, they will come.

I remember the first two weeks of my sentence, locked away in New Haven County Jail in Connecticut. I remember being outside in a courtyard eating from a styrofoam tray while I sat with my legs crossed and my back laid against the wall. A man approached me, he was about 5’8’’, shoulders hunched, dark brown skin and his hair was shoulder length and matted. He sat down next to me and immediately asked me about my wedding band. “Who you married to?” he asked. “Girl or guy?” Immediately, I lied. I felt bad for lying. He opened up. He told me he was gay. At that moment, I felt like I should have opened up to him and told him that I was married to a man. That I was happily married to a man. But, I wanted to protect myself, just in case. I felt like I had. The man kept talking and I wished the best for him silently as I looked up to the sun that shone down over us. I stopped talking to him because I didn’t want to be associated with a gay inmate. Because, just as my eyes moved about my surroundings, I knew that others did the same – quietly, calculating their surroundings.

I have been with Freedom Reads since February of 2023. My job consists of building Freedom Libraries at our shop in Hamden, Connecticut. Working with my hands to make sure that people on the inside are able to see these beautiful wooden Freedom Libraries and run their hands along the wood that I put my hands on.

The paradox of incarceration is that if you’ve been inside, you desperately want to believe that the time you spent in those cells matters. You understand that you did more than weep in those cells, more than endure suffering. You know that you’ve nurtured anger and then figured out how to let it go, if you’re lucky. You know that you’ve discovered ways to forgive yourself, often long before the people in the world knew your name. You know you spent more hours than you know figuring out how to apologize, and then even more hours afraid to do it. And sadly, you know the world holds that work in slight regard.

Taven, young by any measure whether Inside or out, sat preoccupied in the corner of the library turned poetry stage turned polling station at North Dakota State Penitentiary (NDSP). He was scheduled for a parole hearing on the day Freedom Reads arrived to bring acclaimed poet Roger Bonair-Agard and a handful of Inside Literary Prize ballots to vote on books. I gave him a knowing handshake. I, too, needed a distraction on the day I went up before the parole board that granted me freedom after serving seven days short of 30 years on the Inside. He reminded me of the 17-year-old version of myself who cared less about books and more about surviving the rest of my life in a place that looked like anything but a library. He showed up for our event though, the way Freedom Reads shows up for people incarcerated, and the way I now have shown up to 25 prisons since being released just 17 months ago. I gave him a ton of credit.

Yesterday I learned something. One of our team members, a brother who has been with us for nearly a year now, served time in prison. I never knew. I thought of him in the same way that I’ve thought of Claire in the past, or Allie now, or Gabby. I thought of Mike in the same way I’ve thought of Tyler or David or any of the dozens of people we work with, which is to say, I thought of him as one of the bedrocks of the organization. See, Mike is one of the folks that touches nearly every Freedom Library that we build, working with his hands to transform remnants of trees into hope and possibility. And yesterday, as we celebrated a significant grant given to us by the Connecticut Health and Educational Facilities Authority (CHEFA), he talked about the time he’d served in prison and what it meant to come home to this work.

I stumbled upon Freedom Reads Founder Reginald Dwayne Betts’ book, FELON, in a random room at Cybulski Correctional Institution in Enfield, Connecticut. I talked about the book with my now colleague, Steven Parkhurst, while we were both on the inside. Steve talked about potentially speaking with Dwayne soon and I talked about what amazing work Freedom Reads was doing. We both talked about how thrilling it would be to work for an organization like that.