Blog

I came home from prison on March 4, 2005. March forth: the only date in the calendar that is also a command. This time of year makes me think all the more sharply of my friends still inside, not yet getting to act out that imperative. Freedom Reads will mark the date this year with a (virtual) celebration of our Freedom Library’s curation.

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.