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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. 

In a few days, the Freedom Reads team will set off for North Dakota and Minnesota, for the second leg of the Inside Literary Prize tour. We’ll meet dozens of Inside Literary Prize judges, lead live discussions about the books, and host literary readings with Roger Bonair-Agard, Douglas Kearney, and Randall Horton.

This is what they cannot tell you to expect: that you’ll return. No, that’s not true. They predict that you will return in handcuffs. Never as it happened on March 4, 2024. That morning, I returned as a poet who would perform for them as if the men inside were a Broadway audience; I returned as someone who’d served time with them, as a lawyer who’d been trained in the cells they knew too well.

Freedom Reads Program Coordinators David Perez Jr and Gabby Colangelo provide an update on the Inside Literary Prize, the first-ever US-based literary prize awarded exclusively by currently incarcerated people.

There are more than 800 pillars, large corten steel monuments that seemingly hang from the sky at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The monuments are memorials. The Oxford English Dictionary says the etymology, a fancy way to say word origin, of memorial is the Latin memoriālis, an adjective for records or the French memorial, an adjective for commemorative, remembered. In this country, there are more things that we would rather forget than remember. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is about remembering. And so, each pillar has the name of a county in America where a lynching has occurred, each has the names, when known, of people who were lynched in this country. 

Freedom Reads put on literary events at Rhode Island prisons for the first time last week. Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts performed his one-man show, FELON: An American Washi Tale. Following the show, Dwayne and Freedom Reads Program Coordinator Steven Parkhurst, who served over 26 years at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institution (ACI), had a wide-ranging conversation about the experience of incarceration and the importance of literature and literary events in transforming the lives of incarcerated people.