Meet The Team: Library Production Associate Michael Byrd
Michael Byrd had just come home after spending 17 years in prison and didn’t even have an ID. Then he was introduced to the team at Freedom Reads through a reentry program called Emerge. In January 2024, he joined the team as a Library Production Assistant assembling and building bookcases, “and going into prisons to open Freedom Libraries.” But that was just the beginning.
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Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has won the 2025 Inside Literary Prize.
At a ceremony on Thursday night, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars was awarded the second annual Inside Literary Prize, the first-ever US-based literary award to be judged by currently incarcerated people.
Inside prison walls, here's how a book program is changing lives
Accessing reading material in prisons is hard, but Freedom Reads co-founder Reginald Betts, a former inmate, went beyond books, creating libraries made by former prisoners.
Why a Cellmate is Not like a Roommate
“The prison is like an isolated town with nowhere to go. And the cell is our whole house,” Biktor B. writes, adding that this “house” is shared by complete and often incompatible strangers, who have next to nothing in common.
What Is it Like to Live in a Halfway House?
Kashawn Taylor writes about the expectations and realities of living in a halfway house after leaving prison, noting “it feels like freedom, with an asterisk.”
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June 2025 Newsletter
Freedom Reads: Hope, Faith & Curiosity
Latest Episode
The Past's Presence: Jesmyn Ward
In today’s episode, Jesmyn Ward reads from her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is at once a bildungsroman, a ghost story, an epic, and a road novel. In portraying the suck of Parchman Prison on the generations of one Mississippi family, Ward deftly explores how the real threat of incarceration haunts these psyches and, in turn, these familial relationships. In this moving conversation, Ward reflects on living with grief, on listening for communications from beyond our immediate reality, and on the central commitments of her work: to restore agency to the kinds of characters too often denied a voice—and to grant acceptance to the ones harder to forgive. (July 26, 2021)