Freedom begins with a book
Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder and director of Freedom Reads, a first-of-its-kind organization that empowers people through literature to confront what prison does to the spirit.
Doggerel
Doggerel is a revelatory meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and vulnerability from one of poetry’s boldest voices.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a prosaic, and equally rich lens: dogs. Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a mediation on fatherhood, falling in love, and friendship, and those who accompany us on our walks through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us “how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative” (Dan Chaisson, New Yorker)—and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.
"Doggerel is an apt name for this lovely collection, with the canine-hidden-in-plain-sight in its title and coursing through so many of the poems. Betts manages to capture essences―of memory, of hope or loss, of oft-overlooked everydayness―in a way that feels surprising and familiar at once."
― Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and the Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform access to literature in prisons.
The author of a memoir and four collections of poetry, he has transformed his American Book Award Winning Felon, into a solo theater show “March Forth” that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of papermaking. His current book Doggerel appears on the 20th anniversary of his release from prison.
In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his New York Times Magazine essay, Getting Out, that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He is also a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, and has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Emerson Fellow at New America.
In 2020, after staying in New Haven post-graduation from Yale Law School, Betts founded Freedom Reads. Freedom Reads, headquartered in Hamden and employing several formerly incarcerated individuals, is the only organization in the country with a mission to open libraries in prison cellblocks, and thereby support the efforts of incarcerated individuals to imagine new possibilities for their lives. These libraries provide a locus where conversation and community build. They are objects of beauty and contain a 500-book, carefully curated collection that includes poetry, literature, non-fiction, and more. As Betts often declares, “Freedom begins with a book.”
March Forth
Alone in solitary confinement, a teenager called out: “Somebody, send me a book!” Moments later, Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets slid under his cell door. Those pages were the start of the teen’s transformation into a poet, lawyer, and promoter of the rights of prisoners. Now, 20 years to the day of his release from prison on March 4, 2005, Reginald Dwayne Betts explores the experience and consequences of his incarceration in a compelling new solo performance based on his American Book Award-winning poetry collection, Felon, with conversation to follow.
Betts brings his story on the importance of mercy, the realities of life after prison, and the role art and literature can play in the fight for justice to the PAC NYC stage. Buy tickets here.
Contact for Speaking Engagements
David McCormick
McCormick Literary
McCormick Literary
New York, NY 10001
212-691-9726
