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There are more than 800 pillars, large corten steel monuments that seemingly hang from the sky at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The monuments are memorials. The Oxford English Dictionary says the etymology, a fancy way to say word origin, of memorial is the Latin memoriālis, an adjective for records or the French memorial, an adjective for commemorative, remembered. In this country, there are more things that we would rather forget than remember. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is about remembering. And so, each pillar has the name of a county in America where a lynching has occurred, each has the names, when known, of people who were lynched in this country. 

“A yo Shy, you know this ain’t your fault right,” my man calls to tell me the day after he’s been denied parole again. I’m his lawyer. But also his friend. We've called the same prison cells home. And so he wants me to know that he doesn’t blame me for this. He says this failure ain’t on me, it’s on the system. I’ve heard it before. From other friends. Always consoling me as if I’m still going to be serving time instead of them.

It hasn’t been a month since I let you know about opening our 200th Freedom Library, which happened in late October at New York’s Otisville Correctional Facility. Because our team only rests on December the 32nd, we’ll be closing out 2023 with 239 Freedom Libraries in 33 prisons and juvenile detention centers across ten states. But we have a long way to a Freedom Library in every prison cellblock in the United States. We cannot expand our reach without your support.

On November 29, 2023, as part of our goal of opening a Freedom Library in every cellblock in the United States, we opened four more Freedom Libraries at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola). But that ain’t half the story. Walking back inside the acres that were once a plantation but now a prison was James Washington. James entered Angola as a teenager and would go on to serve 25 years there. Those who don’t know better might call him a convict or, better still, formerly incarcerated. But once, I walked onto Angola with James. Angola, one of the most fierce prisons in this country. I watched men greet James like a brother. Watched him embraced by men he did decades with. And I watch him greeted as friend, as brother, as mentor, as counselor – not once, not even by the staff there, as inmate, prisoner, formerly incarcerated.

Not too long ago, the Freedom Library was but an idea. A dream under development. My entire life had been spent thinking about prison: in poetry, in essays, when I had to explain to my son what it meant to be in prison. But as much as I’d thought about prison, I’d spent little time thinking of what it would have meant to have been able to read Shakespeare before being required to by Professor Sandy Mack years after prison. When asked how I might make the most difference in addressing all the suffering caused by prisons and incarceration, I thought of what saved me: books.

Twenty-six years ago today, on December 8, 1996, I confessed to carjacking a man. In some ways, everything that I’ve done since then has been moving towards a kind of amends. Sometimes books are the opposite of violence, opening up the possibility for another tomorrow. I started Freedom Reads, not just to place beautiful, handcrafted wooden shelves with five hundred of the best books you can find on prison housing units all across this country, I started it to return to prisons with something more than the violence that first brought me there. 

I tell people: several days after the Freedom Reads team opened three Freedom Libraries at Otisville Correctional Facility in late August, I was still unable to let go of how much of a wonder it was.

I dedicated FELON, my last poetry collection, to Christopher Tunstall, Rojai Fentress, Terrell Kelly and other friends of mine who were then still serving time in prison. The book was hardback – and because many prisons disallow hardback books, I’d struggle to get it inside. That problem led me to create an early paperback edition, the Freedom Edition of FELON, only for those on the inside. Then, I transformed the poems into a solo play I could embody and walk inside myself. Why?

I have always felt my freedom begins with a book – both as a tool of liberation and as a means of engendering empathy. I learned this in a cell, where Freedom Reads began – where the notion of transforming lives with books began for me.

While riding to MCI-Norfolk the day we placed the library, I read Malcolm X’s take of his time there. Read how books transformed the way he thought of the world. Walking into the prison, I didn’t know what to expect, though I know prisons and all of their complex brutalities.

Names matter. In prison, I found myself around a bunch of teenagers who, wanting to be more than whatever crime landed them there, gave themselves the names they hoped to grow into. I took on Shahid, meaning "witness," true to the way the things I'd see would shape me afterward. Then, I came home to reclaim my father's name and try again to make good on whatever his parents imagined it promised him, and what he and my moms had imagined it promised me. 

I came home from prison on March 4, 2005. March forth: the only date in the calendar that is also a command. This time of year makes me think all the more sharply of my friends still inside, not yet getting to act out that imperative. Freedom Reads will mark the date this year with a (virtual) celebration of our Freedom Library’s curation.