Twenty-two years ago, I was a teenager in solitary confinement at the Southampton Correctional Center. One afternoon, I shouted to the men in the hole with me: “Somebody, send me a book!” Moments later, Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets was slid under my cell door. By whom, I never knew. But the book got me through some long days.
Once I finished it, I looked for others. Books reaffirmed my dignity, connected me in community with fellow readers, and paved a path that took me from prison to a law degree from Yale Law School, inspiring three collections of poems and a memoir along the way.
With generous support from the Mellon Foundation, I founded Freedom Reads to allow books to transform others as they have me. This project will curate a 500-book Freedom Collection and plant it in prisons and juvenile detention centers across this country. We aim to place these words in the living spaces of people incarcerated, as well as in areas dedicated to corrections staff and administration – reimagining the engagement that is possible with literature. While there are many reasons we read and study, chief among them is that when we do, we become – in the words of Frederick Douglass – “forever free.”