Founder's Take: 1 to 500 (and Counting!)
During the fall of 2021, I drove down a stretch of highway headed towards MCI-Norfolk, a prison in Massachusetts made famous in part by the years that Malcolm X and other prisoners incarcerated there did their thing on a debate team that battled the likes of Harvard and other elite institutions. I was headed there with my Freedom Reads’ team to open our first Freedom Library. It’s a wondrous thing to do something for the first time, and on that morning, having ridden for two hours in the passenger seat, an open laptop as I wrote about the late Michael K Williams, I struggled with the juxtaposition I’ve lived with since handcuffs first graced my wrists: the possibility and potential of Black men and all the public ways we often die too soon. Williams once told me that his dream was to build a center where young folks who were like he once was, desiring more than the violence and poverty around them, could actively envision better tomorrows and learn dance and acting and what it means to be safe. That is part of my dream for the Freedom Library.
Continue Reading
Five Summer Reads from the Freedom Library
As the end of summer rolls in and life settles into a slower rhythm, it’s a good time to pick up a new read. Whether you’re cooling off with an ice-cold drink or staying inside to escape the heat, a thoughtful read can be a perfect companion.
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.
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)