Media

Interviews

May 2, 2022 | Dwayne Betts on Ellison, Levi, and Human Suffering
EconTalk Podcast

Mar 23, 2022 | Freedom Library exhibit highlights Reginald Dwayne Betts' work bringing books inside prisons
WBUR Here & Now

Dec 7, 2021 | Reginald Dwayne Betts, Poet and Lawyer, 2021 MacArthur Fellow
MacArthur Foundation

Oct 19, 2021 | From inmate to Yale-trained lawyer to MacArthur “genius”
MSNBC Zerlina

Oct 19, 2020 | Dwayne Betts on Reading, Prison, and Freedom Reads
EconTalk Podcast

Mar 22, 2020 | In 'Felon,' Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts Returns To His Time In Prison
NPR - All Things Considered

Jan 22, 2020 | How Reginald Dwayne Betts Found His Poetic Voice in Prison
PBS Amanpour & Co

Nov 3, 2019 | ‘Felon’ Author Says, ‘Everybody has to Tell Their Kids Something’
NPR - All Things Considered

Oct 7, 2019 | Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Poetry After Prison
New Yorker Magazine

Nov 5, 2019 | In 'Felon', Reginald Dwayne Betts Reflects On Life After Prison
Connecticut Public Radio / WNPR

News & Mentions

Apr 17, 2022 | This road to redemption began with a poetry book slipped under a prison cell door 
Washington Examiner

Mar 16, 2022 | Freedom library on display at National Building Museum 
Washington Post

Mar 2, 2022 | He went from prison to a MacArthur Fellow. Here's how he's trying to help Louisiana inmates
The Advocate

Oct 8, 2021 | Reginald Dwayne Betts on his groundbreaking prison library project
The Guardian

Oct 15, 2019 | A Poet and Ex-Con Writes About Life After Prison
NY Times Book Review

Dec 7, 2021 | Malcolm X’s former prison cell becomes first of 1,000 planned ‘freedom libraries’
The Guardian

“Felon is the keenest of testaments to what it’s like to have lived behind the walls, to the crucible of having one’s humanity challenged, changed, erased, to how―for the anointed―prisons persist beyond the walls. While there are poems aplenty on the mental and physical violence of prison and our unjustice system, the collection is also a moving exploration of love―romantic and familial―and how one nurtures that love against odds that at times seem impossible. Felon is bracing, revelatory work. Read it and be transformed.”

Mitchell S. Jackson
Author of Survival Math

“On every page of Felon, a book unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, there’s something far more playful, resonant, and ruggedly revealing happening. Reginald Dwayne Betts animates and really embodies the minutiae of revision in this once-in-a-lifetime art object…Betts’s artistry shows and proves a necessary breaking and blurring of the lines between wandering into yesterday, wondering into tomorrow, and wrestling with the funk of today. Betts has written the twenty-first-century book that will dictate how freedom, power and consequence are written about until the sun says enough. It is that good.”

Kiese Laymon
Author of Heavy: An American Memoir

“Felon is a stunningly crafted indictment of prison’s dehumanization of Black men and their loved ones. Through his unvarnished descriptions of the path to prison and its aftermath from myriad vantage points―son, husband, father, cellmate, Yale-educated public defender―Betts does nothing to protect himself, or us, from what he has done and suffered and witnessed. His compassion and breathtaking literary gifts make it impossible for us to look away or remain complicit in mass criminalization’s status quo.”

Sujatha Baliga
Director of the Restorative Justice Project