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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.

The 2025 Inside Literary Prize orientation sessions kicked off with an esteemed cohort of Inside Judges! Across 13 prisons in five states and Puerto Rico, over 300 incarcerated individuals stepped into the role of judges and are taking part in an initiative that elevates the voice and agency of those locked up. With these four books in hand, Chain-Gang All-Stars, On a Woman's Madness, This Other Eden, and Blackouts, these sessions, both virtual and in-person, were not just about preparing judges for the task ahead, selecting a book they felt the world needed to read, but about creating a space where their voices, perspectives, and experiences could be amplified and recognized. The men and women Inside are central to the conversation about literature in America.

This is what I know about sadness: it frightens people. One day, you wake up and your world feels filled with the second O of sorrow. This is what my friend Sean Thomas Dougherty might say. He is a white man, who works the night shift and writes beautiful poems about being alive in this cruel world. He once wrote a poem about Biggie Smalls that made me believe he was from my neighborhood. And no matter how sad his songs have been, they make me believe there is a world just past suffering. And when I read him, even when he is suffering between those lines, I imagine the writing has given him some of that place that is more heaven than purgatory.

This year, something extraordinary happened. A group of ten individuals from all across the country came together to decide the shortlisted titles for the Inside Literary Prize 2025. But here’s the thing—this wasn’t just any group of book lovers. Our Selection Committee was a unique blend of people from the Inside: prison librarians, formerly incarcerated folks, and the incredible members of the Freedom Reads team (yes, yours truly included). Together, we embarked on a two-month journey that was far more than just reading—it was about connection, reflection, and reclaiming the power of stories.

I remember my first holiday meal in prison. I’d just turned eighteen-years-old a few weeks before, my second of eight birthdays Inside. I was at Southampton Correctional Center in Capron, Virginia. There are still a lot of folks I remember who would have been in the chow hall that day, some I still talk to. Fats, Star, Divine, Smoke. That dinner, they served Cornish hens. I didn’t know what that was then but knew it was delicious. Later found out these hens are juvenile chickens particularly tender for eating.

A full moon cast a wintry bright light over London while people from all over the world hurried across cobblestoned streets to the seasonal sound of Christmas. Street-corner Santas held gleaming brass bells which they shook endlessly in the cold night. From high-end boutiques glittering up and down and all around in silver and gold, to the pipe smoking vendor selling bourbon laced eggnog with candy cane mixers, to the church choir singing “We Three Kings” beneath a Victorian-era lamppost, the scene in London was about one thing: Christmas. The holiday was here, large and in charge. It was holding the candle of religion in one hand, while balancing the candle of commercialization in the other. Whether or not you or anyone else was in the mood for Christmas, the sights and sounds of the city in December were doing their level best to get you there.

In October, Freedom Reads received over 100 letters from people who are incarcerated, our first time crossing this milestone. For someone like me, who spent seven days short of 30 years in prison, sleeping in 11 different facilities across two states, this milestone is deeply personal. I know firsthand the power of a letter, the way it can pierce through the isolation and remind someone Inside that they are still seen, still valued, still connected to the outside world…still somebody.

Without me knowing it, prison became the center of my life. I have thought about what a prison cell does to a man for more consecutive days than I have contemplated what it means to be a good man, let alone a father. Sometimes, I imagine that prison has become more than a metaphor, but the literal antecedent to every move I make. It’s a lonely place.

This fall, Freedom Reads welcomed two University of Michigan PhD student fellows to the team. Meet Carina and Ryan below, and read on to hear about their experience working with Freedom Reads and what they will take away from their time here.

​​My first day at Freedom Reads, I teared up upon walking through the front door. Greeting me in the middle of the open space, beckoning me to fully step into the wooden warmth decorating the walls and floor was the free-floating Freedom Library, filled to the brim with books familiar and new. I had never been in such close proximity to something so beautiful that I could actually touch. The hundreds of books that sat upon those curving shelves left me speechless, and the bookworm in me who grew up with limited access to books felt genuinely giddy at seeing so many books I could pick out at any time and read.

I’ve learned that some of us, with these two ears of ours, though parallel and balanced, still hear like owls – with a particular precision. Owls have ears that almost function as longitude and latitude. At forty miles per hour and over three feet of freshly fallen snow, an owl can swoop down and locate the heart pulse of a mole twelve inches buried in white. I am humbled by that necessary focus. And though my brain is scattered as some memories might be, my receptors are finely tuned to decipher, and sometimes only this, complicated text into the reasons I am not loved.

Robert Lee Williams is a journalist and poet. His work has been published by Literary Hub, PEN America, Plough Quarterly (United States/and Germany), and Slate. Williams is serving his 15th year of incarceration in New York.