Blog

The first time I went to Puerto Rico, my oldest son, Micah—who just turned eighteen this month—was still in grade school. His little brother Miles wasn’t yet a year old. It was 2012 and I would have never imagined Freedom Reads, an organization that believes literature is a conduit to the kind of joy I felt watching my oldest play with his little brother walking distance from one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever traversed. The clarity of the water, the way the waves half-washed all the years of prison I’d known. I was there for a conference, and prison was somehow both the furthest thing from my mind and the closest thing on it. Because that’s how it’s been since March 4th, 2005: no matter the city, no matter the coast, every place I’ve been has circled back to prison, or to the long shadow of my relationship with it.

I attended a book reading and discussion hosted by Freedom Reads on October 10th with acclaimed poet and Freedom Reads founder and CEO, Dwayne Betts, and award-winning author and Harvard professor, Imani Perry, at MCI-Framingham. When I arrived at the women’s prison I learned that it is the oldest operating women's prison in the country, opening in 1877. 

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.