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Robert Lee Williams is a journalist and poet. His work has been published by Literary Hub, PEN America, Plough Quarterly (United States/and Germany), and Slate. Williams is serving his 15th year of incarceration in New York.

This is what David Foster Wallace says – the only choice we get is what we worship. And for many years, I have worshipped a Janus-Faced G-d. The G-d of Silence and the G-d of Discontent. I've probably worshipped other g-ds as well, maybe we all have. But these days I think a lot about silence and discontent. It's wild, too, in a way, as someone recently said to me, Dwayne, I'm surprised you complain about anything, look at how charmed your life is.

In a recent trip Inside, there was a day that radiated with unexpected joy and connection. It was a special event organized by Freedom Reads. As you may know, our organization is dedicated to bringing the transformative power of literature to incarcerated individuals. The air was thick with anticipation as the day’s discussions unfolded. The inaugural Inside Literary Prize was at the forefront, with thoughtful conversations about why these titles mattered and how they could resonate with those behind bars and the world.

Freedom Reads was back at it again, opening 42 Freedom Libraries in three Connecticut prisons: MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, Cybulski Community Reintegration Center, and Cheshire Correctional Institution. Prison numbers 36, 37, and 38 visited since my release 22 months ago from seven days short of 30 years Inside. For those of us formerly incarcerated in Connecticut on the Freedom Reads team—Kevin, Mike, Jimmy, David, and myself—these places held memories, both painful and transformative.

For years I’ve had a gripe with the ACLU. During the winter of 1998, the same winter that I became a poet, my friend Markeese Turnage and I wrote a letter to the ACLU asking for legal help. Keese had been sentenced to more than sixty years in prison. He didn’t have a rape, murder, or robbery conviction. Instead, he’d wrangled an officer’s gun from him and attempted to turn it on himself. The gun never went off. No one was hurt. He was 17 years old. For Christmas that year, the ACLU sent us a form letter back. And today, Keese is still incarcerated. I’d used his story to get myself admitted to Yale Law School; I’d used his story to get him a lawyer once I was a graduate of the same. And still, years later, he is inside, as loss after loss accumulates.

This story was published in partnership with Prison Journalism Project, a national nonprofit organization which trains incarcerated writers in journalism and publishes their work. Sign up for PJP’s newsletter, follow them on Instagram or connect with them on LinkedIn.

This is what they don’t tell you: men and women, people in prison, laugh. They will not say that we get wise, make discoveries, struggle with more than the inexorable weight of time. And Freedom Reads celebrates that. The reasons for this celebration, at least for me, have become most relevant these days – when the losses of the world feel innumerable and remind me of time marking days off a calendar that seemed would last forever.

The role I play here at Freedom Reads gives me the ability to see both the front-end and the back-end results of the great work we do at Freedom Reads. My primary job is to make sure the handcrafted furniture we create here at Freedom Reads Headquarters in Connecticut is put together properly, and we build enough units each day to meet the demand of our efforts to place these Freedom Libraries into cellblocks at correctional facilities all over the country. 

This summer, Freedom Reads welcomed five interns to the team, marking the second year of Freedom Reads' internship program. Over the course of eight weeks, interns worked with the Freedom Reads Team on projects that aligned with their unique interests and skills: everything from automating databases to researching and writing impact reports to producing video content for social media. Read on to hear directly from the interns about their experience working with Freedom Reads and what they will take away from their time here.

It was all a dream. Or not a dream, but a fantasy, this belief that people would get behind the idea of the Freedom Library. The Freedom Library, which, at its root, is simply the notion that beauty and literature matter. That nature matters. That incarceration should not deprive people of these things. To put this all in another way, I’ll say that I was thinking like they thought with the Field of Dreams, that is: If you build it, they will come.

I remember the first two weeks of my sentence, locked away in New Haven County Jail in Connecticut. I remember being outside in a courtyard eating from a styrofoam tray while I sat with my legs crossed and my back laid against the wall. A man approached me, he was about 5’8’’, shoulders hunched, dark brown skin and his hair was shoulder length and matted. He sat down next to me and immediately asked me about my wedding band. “Who you married to?” he asked. “Girl or guy?” Immediately, I lied. I felt bad for lying. He opened up. He told me he was gay. At that moment, I felt like I should have opened up to him and told him that I was married to a man. That I was happily married to a man. But, I wanted to protect myself, just in case. I felt like I had. The man kept talking and I wished the best for him silently as I looked up to the sun that shone down over us. I stopped talking to him because I didn’t want to be associated with a gay inmate. Because, just as my eyes moved about my surroundings, I knew that others did the same – quietly, calculating their surroundings.

I have been with Freedom Reads since February of 2023. My job consists of building Freedom Libraries at our shop in Hamden, Connecticut. Working with my hands to make sure that people on the inside are able to see these beautiful wooden Freedom Libraries and run their hands along the wood that I put my hands on.