January 2025 Newsletter
Freedom Reads: Inside Literary Prize 2025
Founder's Take
This is what I know about sadness: it frightens people. One day, you wake up and your world feels filled with the second O of sorrow. This is what my friend Sean Thomas Dougherty might say. He is a white man, who works the night shift and writes beautiful poems about being alive in this cruel world. He once wrote a poem about Biggie Smalls that made me believe he was from my neighborhood. And no matter how sad his songs have been, they make me believe there is a world just past suffering. And when I read him, even when he is suffering between those lines, I imagine the writing has given him some of that place that is more heaven than purgatory.
So much of prison is purgatory. Is suffering. Is believing you deserve the worst of it. Maybe that’s why we hide the bits of joy that we experience there. But my time in prison was more than grieving all I’d lost by what I’d allowed myself to become.
And maybe I’m sad because so much of what I have become can be traced to four walls that exerted so much pressure on me. And I know I am more ragged stone than diamond. I once read though that stones, some, are harder to break than a diamond. Jade for instance.
While I’ve often been more jaded than joyful, I do think that I have also been more jade than diamond. Because I have sorrow now, public sorrow, people keep imagining that I am disappearing. But I lived free in prison and returned to try to be a salve to the sorrow of others. And will return again. Because I walked into prison more fragile than a lie and emerged a friend and a poet and a man with a name for every part of my identity I needed to learn to love: Shahid, Young Music, Shy, Jojo Santana, the Rugged Child and others, Eddie Kane, D, Reggie, Reginald, and the names the woman who loves me calls me.
This is all I mean to say: in prison, we have always been more than our sorrow. And our sorrow sometimes has become a sort of portal. It’s like my Elder Afaa had told me of Black men, sometimes suffering is, where pain is the gateway/ toJerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling,/ keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.
And if he is right, with all the weeping I do, the g-ds must love me. And if g-d loves me, he loves everyone I love in prison, as I know that’s where I first learned to utter my own name.
And maybe I have hidden my joy from you - but even Inside it was there, like that time Scoobie made a birthday card for me on my 21st birthday. Everyone signed it and a CO brought it to me. And I knew I was loved. And there was joy in that. And it does not matter that I kept it in my heart alone.
Those days were far harder than these. And maybe the second O of sorrow is the only O in joy.
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO
Inside Literary Prize 2025 Shortlist Announced
This week, Freedom Reads, the National Book Foundation, and the Center for Justice Innovation announced the shortlist for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize (ILP), the first-ever US-based literary prize awarded exclusively by currently incarcerated people.
- Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
- Paul Harding, This Other Eden
- Astrid Roemer, On a Woman’s Madness (Translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott)
- Justin Torres, Blackouts
The prize will be awarded in June 2025 to one exceptional book by a jury of 300 incarcerated individuals from a dozen prisons across the nation. This initiative, which is also supported by Lori Feathers, literary podcaster and co-owner of Interabang Books, seeks to expand access to our country’s most thought-provoking literature for people who are incarcerated.
Hear from currently incarcerated members of the Selection Committee for this year’s prize and learn more about this year’s ILP tour in the press release.
Behind the Scenes of the Inside Literary Prize: A Journey of Books, Freedom, and Connection
Freedom Reads Library Coordinator David Perez DeHoyos writes about participating in this year’s Inside Literary Prize Selection Committee.
There were moments when books made us yearn for the simple comfort of speaking to our mothers or fathers. In the stories of these books, we saw our parents as humans, with their own struggles, hopes, and dreams—reminding us of the shared humanity we sometimes forget exists between the lines. We talked about how parts of our own identities sometimes felt just out of reach, thanks to the forces that tried to erase us—censorship, violence, intergenerational trauma, and colonialism. And yet, with every turn of the page, we also discovered how much we could fight back, reclaim, and reshape our narratives.
When regrets become wings: Reginald Dwayne Betts for TEDx
In 2024, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts spoke about prison, regrets, hope, and books for TEDx at Green Rock Correctional Center in Virginia.
I have so many regrets. I thought my regrets would bury me. And then I realized that I made of my regrets, feathers.
March Forth at the Perelman Performing Arts Center
On March 4, 2025, 20 years to the day of his release from prison, Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts will perform a solo show, entitled March Forth, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City. Dwayne will explore the experience and consequences of his incarceration in a compelling new solo performance, with conversation to follow.
Limited tickets still available
Pre-Order Doggerel by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Doggerel, the latest poetry collection by Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, is a revelatory meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and vulnerability. Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life.
Doggerel is available March 4, 2025.
Commemorative edition: "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
This January, HarperCollins released a beautiful, commemorative edition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" featuring an afterword by Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts.
The commemorative edition is the latest publication in HarperCollins' "The Essential Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." series.
Freedom Reads in the Media
Starting off January, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about HarperCollins’ newly-released commemorative edition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” with an afterword by Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts. Dwayne spoke and wrote about the life and legacy of Dr. King throughout the month, including on Oprah Daily, Spectrum News NY1, and at the Cambridge Public Library, as reported in Harvard Magazine.
While the Inside Literary Prize 2025 shortlist was just announced yesterday, coverage has already begun, including from Kirkus Reviews.
Why This Work Matters
Each newsletter we aim to share at least one letter (or excerpt) from one of Freedom Reads now 37,000-plus Freedom Library patrons. Freedom Reads receives many letters from the Inside. They mean so much to us. And we respond to each and every one of them
I was lucky enough to be at the one-man show you offered here at Cheshire and I found it incredible. I sincerely hope you will be able to bring another at some point in the future. … Secondly, I want to give my thanks for the books you donated to the prison. I have read several of the books that are on our shelves, some prior to the donation and others straight off of the shelves you gave. In fact, I am currently involved in the prison education program offered here by Wesleyan University and, because I knew that “Native Son” by Richard Wright will be part of the required reading next semester, I grabbed it off of our shelf and got a head start.
In closing, I just want to offer your organization some reassurance about the work you do and its importance. I came to prison at the age of fifteen. All I knew was the streets and the negative mentality that came with that lifestyle. Had it not been for my taking an interest in books and then education as a whole, there is no telling who I would be today. But now, sixteen years later, at the age of thirty one, I am in the prison’s H.O.N.O.R. Program and I am four classes shy of earning my bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan with a 4.08 GPA. I say this not to pat myself on the back, but to assure that a simple book can change lives. Thank you all so much for the work that you do and please keep fighting the good fight.
Our work isn’t possible without your support. Thank you for supporting us in our vision to open a Freedom Library in every cellblock in every prison in America.