December 21 – Virtual

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 five collections of poetry, Dwayne’s latest book of poetry is Doggerel (2025). Dwayne transformed his 2019 collection of poetry, the American Book Award Winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record. In 2021 Dwayne became a MacArthur Fellow, and in the past has been awarded fellowships from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, the National Endowment of the Arts, Emerson Collective, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Dwayne holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. In 2020, Dwayne founded Freedom Reads with a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Freedom Reads employs several formerly incarcerated individuals and 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. As Dwayne often declares, “Freedom begins with a book.”