October 2024 Newsletter

I’ve learned that some of us, with these two ears of ours, though parallel and balanced, still hear like owls – with a particular precision. Owls have ears that almost function as longitude and latitude. At forty miles per hour and over three feet of freshly fallen snow, an owl can swoop down and locate the heart pulse of a mole twelve inches buried in white. I am humbled by that necessary focus. And though my brain is scattered as some memories might be, my receptors are finely tuned to decipher, and sometimes only this, complicated text into the reasons I am not loved.
 
The noise of the world, disconcerting and certain that the story you tell yourself about yourself is untrue is an incredibly lone making place. In sixth grade, when my mother found the crumpled piece of paper offering me a spot in the local magnet program, all I heard was my mother wanted to keep me from my friends, terrified of my neighborhood, terrified that I’d end up in the prisons that I’d find anyway. I could not hear the promise of intellectual challenges and a college education that the paper held for my mother. Back in the day, disputes with friends never fizzled, and because I never learned to throw my hands with the precision that I toss around nouns and verbs, I took a lot of L’s.
 
And maybe because of this, right when I needed to, somebody convinced me that the bridge to loving myself was realizing what a book might remind you of. Trust is a hell of a thing. At the Fairfax County Jail, a teacher, looking at my 120-odd pounds in the state jumpsuit that swamped me, asked what courses I was taking. In a year of incarceration no one wondered if I’d ever sat in one of those awkward desks with the rectangle for your chewing gum. I fell in love with a 60-year-old white woman because she said my intelligence reminded me of her son. An English teacher by trade, it was easy for her to convince me, whose last book checked out from the public library was Evelyn Wood’s Guide to Speed Reading. She had me reading it all - Sophie’s Choice to King Arthur.
 
Post that, post prison, post more books than I could name, I was damn near capable of, on something of a consistent basis, parsing out my life into more than moments of rejoice and recrimination. And then I started returning to prison. There is so much suffering Inside. And other things too. But suffering. The fear of all that might have been and all that will be.
 
I guess I mean to say that Inside I never parsed my life out between rejoice and recrimination. We were struggling towards something, and that struggle was clearest when we were together talking books. That’s what the Freedom Library is about. I, G-d willing, won’t be back on the side of things where I get to know that a Freedom Library matters. But even here, where sometimes every day is simply a struggle to find a way to get to the next day, I am reminded.
 
We called it a +29 party and honestly I might not have come. That morning I’d told someone on the team to cancel it. My life, usually toggling between the two poles, on this morning that flag had planted itself on weeping. But I kept the party on. As I’ve told a friend, New Haven is the pizza capital of America – and I live on one of the eleventeen major pizza thoroughfares in New Haven. And so we had the crew over. Mostly everybody. Sometimes things come up and folks can’t come through.
 
And we had names. Names of books. And those names led us to remember that we know each other in ways that should always remind us that we are never just angry or mean or too talkative, that we are never just loud, just any of these things. Because, and this is what I know, I saw the smiles when Blackouts by Justin Torres came up. When someone mentioned The Body Keeps the Score. Catch-22. Yes people defended Educated by Westover fiercely. And yes, I wept to myself thinking of how it felt to have My Broken Language’s author Quiara Alegría Hudes write me back and say she too understands what it means to try to ride a bicycle mile after mile in this New Haven County.
 
I bought The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, or plan to. I am reading Major Taylor’s biography. Someone mentioned Invisible Ache and I was reminded of how talking keeps you from disappearing, sometimes.
 
And yes, today, on my seat will be Hummingbird Salamander, because if we are lucky, we can turn every place we live into a Freedom Library.

Reginald Dwayne Betts
Freedom Reads Founder & CEO

Five extraordinary individuals – Alex Duran, Gara LaMarche, Steve Levitt, Scott Semple, and Bryan Stevenson – have joined the Freedom Reads Board of Directors, bringing their myriad expertise and experience to further Freedom Reads’ vision of a Freedom Library in every cellblock in every prison in the nation. 

The five new board members join our existing board, including Board Chair Tracey Meares, Board Vice Chair Deborah Leff, and members Helena Huang and Robert Raben. 

This month, the Freedom Reads team traveled to California to open 21 Freedom Libraries at the California Institution for Men (CIM) in Chino. In addition to the Freedom Library openings, Freedom Reads also hosted a special film screening of Exhibiting Forgiveness, the debut feature from visual artist and multihyphenate Titus Kaphar, for an audience inside the prison.

With these openings, Freedom Reads has opened 413 Freedom Libraries across 44 adult and youth prisons in 12 states!

Freedom Reads Assistant Development Manager Allie Salazar Gonzalez reflects on Freedom Reads' recent openings at the California Institution for Men, and what a book can mean for the soul.

Freedom Reads recently launched our Readers for Freedom Reads campaign, a grassroots awareness campaign partnering with bookstores and libraries across the country from Pennsylvania to California! We want to express a big thank you to our first group of partner bookstores for their support in spreading the word about Freedom Reads' mission to inspire and confront what prison does to the spirit.

Are you a bookstore owner or librarian interested in supporting Freedom Reads? Reach out to media@freedomreads.org, and we'll send you a standing poster for your store / library to spread the word!

Earlier this month, Caits Meissner, editor of The Sentences That Create Us, joined Freedom Reads for a virtual Q&A event with women incarcerated at Minnesota Correctional Facility - Shakopee. The Sentences That Create Us by PEN America, with a foreword by Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, features writing by more than fifty individuals, many of whom are incarcerated or justice-impacted, and acts as a guide for incarcerated writers.

Freedom Reads Library Coordinator David Perez Jr moderated the Q&A discussion, which focused on how the book came together and how writing and literature can transform lives.

This month, read about Freedom Reads work and impact in Louisiana in this in-depth feature from Country Roads Magazine. Plus, hear from Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Freedom Reads Board Vice Chair Deborah Leff on ABC Audio’s The Book Case podcast. Dwayne and Deborah discuss the origins and future of Freedom Reads, and how Freedom Libraries bring dignity to prison spaces.

Learn more about Dwayne’s solo show, FELON: An American Washi Tale, in the Chicago Defender. And, read in The Philadelphia Inquirer about Freedom Reads’ partnership with artist Titus Kaphar to screen his debut feature, Exhibiting Forgiveness, for audiences inside prisons.

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.

Our work isn’t possible without your support. Thank you for supporting our vision to open a Freedom Library in every cellblock in every prison in America.