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Not too long ago, the Freedom Library was but an idea. A dream under development. My entire life had been spent thinking about prison: in poetry, in essays, when I had to explain to my son what it meant to be in prison. But as much as I’d thought about prison, I’d spent little time thinking of what it would have meant to have been able to read Shakespeare before being required to by Professor Sandy Mack years after prison. When asked how I might make the most difference in addressing all the suffering caused by prisons and incarceration, I thought of what saved me: books.

Tyler Sperrazza, the Chief Production Officer at Freedom Reads, and I pulled our 26-foot Penske moving truck full of Freedom Libraries into the staff parking lot of the Maine Correctional Center, just a couple dozen feet from the sally-port that gave entrance to the prison grounds. We had just driven 240 miles from Hamden, Connecticut, to Windham, Maine, and my heart was pounding.

Twenty-six years ago today, on December 8, 1996, I confessed to carjacking a man. In some ways, everything that I’ve done since then has been moving towards a kind of amends. Sometimes books are the opposite of violence, opening up the possibility for another tomorrow. I started Freedom Reads, not just to place beautiful, handcrafted wooden shelves with five hundred of the best books you can find on prison housing units all across this country, I started it to return to prisons with something more than the violence that first brought me there. 

A supermoon shining older and colder than superstition cast a wintry light over London while I hurried over cobblestoned streets to the sound of bells ringing in the white-gloved hands of the sidewalk Santa.

I tell people: several days after the Freedom Reads team opened three Freedom Libraries at Otisville Correctional Facility in late August, I was still unable to let go of how much of a wonder it was.

I dedicated FELON, my last poetry collection, to Christopher Tunstall, Rojai Fentress, Terrell Kelly and other friends of mine who were then still serving time in prison. The book was hardback – and because many prisons disallow hardback books, I’d struggle to get it inside. That problem led me to create an early paperback edition, the Freedom Edition of FELON, only for those on the inside. Then, I transformed the poems into a solo play I could embody and walk inside myself. Why?