Episode 549: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and founder of the nonprofit Freedom Reads. His New York Times Magazine article "Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out" won the National Magazine Award. His new podcast is Almost There.

“I felt like I had to own becoming something and intuitively understood that if I didn't lay claim to desiring to be something, that it would be too many other forces that would be pulling on me to dictate that I become something else. … When you say you're a writer, if you know nothing else, then you know that you read. You pay attention to the world. … And prison became the metaphor by which I understood the world and poetry became the medium by which I understood what it meant to write about the world and what it meant to take seriously the responsibility to write about the world that I knew.”

Show notes:

dwaynebetts.com

freedomreads.org

01:00 Almost There with Dwayne Betts (Emerson Collective)

05:00 The Black Poets (Dudley Randall • Bantam • 1985)

10:00 Married… with Children (Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt • Fox • 1987-1997)

21:00 "Scientists and Engineers" (Killer Mike • Michael • 2023)

24:00 "Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out" (New York Times Magazine • Oct 2018)

26:00 "The Language of Birds" (Anselm Kiefer • 2018)

28:00 A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery • 2010)

31:00 Felon: An American Washi Tale

32:00 "Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me" (New York Times Magazine • Oct 2020)

33:00 Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books • 2010)

33:00 Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books • 2015)

33:00 Felon (Norton • 2019)

33:00 Redaction: A Project by Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts (MoMA PS1 • 2019)

33:00 Redaction (Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts • Norton • 2023)

44:00 Creative Nonfiction

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