Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder of Freedom Reads, a first-of-its-kind organization working to radically transform access to literature in prison. Named a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 NEA Fellow, Betts is the author of three poetry collections, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James, 2010), Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015), and Felon (W.W. Norton, 2019), as well as a memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery/Penguin, 2009), which was awarded the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. His writing has earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a New America Fellowship. Betts has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, as well as being interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, The Tavis Smiley Show, and several other national programs. He holds a BA from the University of Maryland; an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow; and a JD from Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Israel H. Perez Prize for best student note or comment appearing in The Yale Law Journal.