Founder's Take: Building a Raft
For years, I let the mistake on Wikipedia remain, the one that says my birthday is February 1st. I’ve grown obsessed with dates and remember reading The Big Sea and the Arnold Rampersand biography of Langston Hughes. Remember the ways that Black history month was both how I connected with history and how I connected myself to history. And I enjoyed the moments I shared with Hughes. Maybe I’ve just wanted to be like my mother, who wrote the first poem I ever read. Her birthday is on February 18th, which is the same day as Toni Morrison’s birthday. And when I learned Toni Morrison’s birthday, while in prison, one of the things that I thought deeply about was the ways in which it is easy to forget that Black history is what happens in your home. And that this, too, is American history.
Continue Reading
A smuggled book changed his life. Now he’s built 500 prison libraries.
Reginald Dwayne Betts was locked up as a teenager for carjacking. Books were his escape, and he went on to be a poet, lawyer and founder of Freedom Reads.
How books — and bookshelves — are helping incarcerated people in Connecticut
In Connecticut, formerly incarcerated people are building bookshelves and filling them with books for donation to prisons. They say reading helped them get through their own sentences.
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.”
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)