Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and prison reform advocate, and the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, which seeks to improve access to literature in prisons. The author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Penguin, 2010) and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest book, the American Book Award-winning Felon (Norton, 2019), into a solo theater show. In 2019, Betts won a National Magazine Award for his New York Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NAACP Image Award, and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellowship. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.This event is co-sponsored with Bennington College’s Prison Education Initiative.
