May 31, 2018

18: Writing About Mass Incarceration Across Genres

1 hour 9 minutes

Poet and memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts and novelist Zachary Lazar join V.V Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell for the first of two special episodes on the effects of mass incarceration on American communities and democracy. Betts, a poet, memoirist and lawyer who was incarcerated as a young man, talks about writing in different genres, as well as the experience of having friends and colleagues write about his character to support his application to the bar and our collective impulse to be punitive. Lazar discusses his recent novel, Vengeance, which is set at Angola, the maximum-security Louisiana state penitentiary where inmates work on a farm that used to be a plantation.

Readings: • Bastards of the Reagan Era, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and A Question of Freedom, by Reginald Dwayne Betts • [“Prison,”](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/prison) by Reginald Dwayne Betts • [“For the City That Nearly Broke Me,”](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/city-nearly-broke-me) by Reginald Dwayne Betts • [“Feeling Fucked Up: The Architecture of Anger”](https://aprweb.org/poems/feeling-fucked-up-the-architecture-of-anger) by Reginald Dwayne Betts • Vengeance, by Zachary Lazar • Crush, by Richard Sitken • The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander • [“For Freckle-Faced Gerald,”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51369/for-freckle-faced-gerald) by Etheridge Knight

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