Fifteen Questions: Reginald Dwayne Betts on Vulnerability, Collective Memory, and Freedom Reads
Reginald D. Betts, founder and CEO of Freedom Reads — the only organization in the country with a mission to open libraries in prison cell blocks — is a poet, activist, lawyer, and a father. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, his latest collection of poetry, “Felon,” was awarded the American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award.
Throughout Betts’ work, prison is a central theme. Memory of his adolescence and young adulthood function as both a location and a metaphor for the consequences of human desperation.
With his sons in the backseat of the call, the visiting professor of English sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss poetry, prison literature, and collective memory.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Can you explain the mission of Freedom Reads and why you believe access to literature is essential for people who are incarcerated?”
“The mission is essentially to bring joy and hope for the possibility of the future to people in prison. We use libraries, the Freedom Library, in particular, as a conduit for that. I think literature and books are essential, just because — I think I riff on Harold Bloom a lot, but he has this quote where he says that you ‘can’t know enough people.’ You go to books because you can’t know enough people, because you can’t know yourself well enough. And because you need to have knowledge of the way things are.”
“As a poet, educator, and advocate, you work at the intersections of literature and prison reform. How do you see literature as a tool for social justice, and what are some practical ways it can be used to transform the criminal justice system?”
“I’m not sure if I would use the word literature and practical in juxtaposition with each other. I think literature allows you to think about what’s not practical at all, and I think in thinking about what’s not practical, you can help imagine what needs to become. Literature is not a tool in the same way that a placard is a tool, in the same way that a stamp is a tool.
“It’s art, and it demands something just as much as it gives. I think a lot of institutions have not thought about what it really means to make artists really a part of what they do.
“I can name Gwendolyn Brooks, who was in the mix in the ’60s. She had a profound influence. So did James Baldwin. I’m not sure if we could talk about our artists in the same respect, if we were being frank and thought about how they were really engaged in whatever moment we think is driving our time.
“And I include myself.”
“What do you think that would look like for them to be profoundly engaged in the same ways as Baldwin?”
“I think that we do have way more access than Baldwin did and than anybody did in that era. So, we aren’t just asked to be artists. We’re often asked to be organizers. And I think that we would have to think about what it means to be an artist and organizer.
“I find myself constantly thinking about it because I run an organization, and I think about my voice as Reginald Dwayne Betts, the poet — how that might create challenges. But in the same way, I think about how it might create challenges for me as a father. Sometimes what I say doesn’t map on to what’s the most effective way for me to be in the world as a father. And so, I think, organizationally, that’s the same kind of thing that you think about. You want to find an artist who’s able to navigate it and in the most efficient way.”
Suddenly, Betts’s thoughts were interrupted by his sons asking for the keys to their house.
“Sorry. We got domestic things happening.”
As he gets out of his car, the moment sparks a tangential thought. “For women, I think about Lucille Clifton. She talked about one of the reasons why she writes really short poems is because she had [six] children. While she was working on being a writer, she was also being a mother, and so, she learned to write in her head in short poems that were sometimes written while cooking.
“You asked about being a activist or in the community and being a writer, and I just picked my sons up from school. I’m about to cook dinner. A lot of times my work as a writer doesn’t include the ways in which we struggle to also be a part of our communities. That also means being a present figure in, first and foremost, the lives of our children and our partners.”
“You explain how, to combat the sorrow, isolation, and oppression of prison cells, some men in solitary confinement created an underground library, with this wildly inventive book delivery system. Could you describe what this innovativeness looked like?”
“I mean, you’re literally talking about sliding books under a cell door. You’re talking about somebody calling out for a book, and then somebody else hearing him and saying, ‘What cell?’ And it’s, ‘Alright boom, here you go.’ SHHH and sending it.” Bett mimicked the sound of sliding books.
“At that point, the architecture was just: If I have a book and you need one, I’m gonna give it to you. Imagine an underground railroad, but instead of passing bodies along, you’re passing books along.”
“SHHH, SHHH, SHHH. That was powerful because it was actually people trying to satisfy a need — that folks were articulating, that was visceral and didn’t actually translate into what others on the outside might have thought was the most urgent desire.”
“In your memoir, ‘A Question of Freedom,’ you reflect on the way prison strips away agency and how literature offers a form of resistance. With the current political atmosphere and the increasing push for censorship, how do you reconcile your experiences with the broader attack on freedom of expression today?”
“Broader is such a dangerous word.
“When we say a broader increase in censorship, I ask myself what that refers to. But also, I also want to ask you, when was the last time you heard somebody read a poem out loud to you?”
“This semester?”
“When was the last time you think your mother or your father or some loved one or uncle, heard somebody read a poem to them?”
“Probably a while.”
“So I would like to think that we have long censored ourselves,” Betts replied.
“I think that we are the people that have a problem. So I would just like to say we should be doing the work to expand the way we think about this world, to expand the landscape, or to expand who has access to literature.”
“Many of your poems feature the voice of Shahid, a persona you’ve developed. How does Shahid allow you to explore themes of imprisonment, personal struggle, and spiritual redemption differently than in your personal work?”
Shahid is not a persona. He’s a person. I went to prison when I was 16, and Shahid is the dude that, you know, he did that time. So when I invoke Shahid, I’m invoking the me that served time in prison, who has, sometimes, a set of experiences that I feel wildly and strangely disconnected from, even though they ostensibly belong to me.
But Shahid is a person, you know. It’s just somebody that breathes, that has a story, a narrative.
“In your poetry collections, such as ‘Shahid Reads His Own Palm,’ you often explore themes of identity, freedom, and trauma. How do you balance personal vulnerability with artistic expression in your writing?”
“I don’t think vulnerability is always a weakness. Usually, when we think about balancing vulnerability, we’re thinking about how we balance our weakness. But what if vulnerability was actually a superpower? And the question is, how do you lean into your vulnerability?”
Betts then referred back to a moment in the interview when I apologized for coughing, and his son interjected with the idea that people should always be happy.
“What my son just said was profound, though. He jumped into a conversation, which means he was listening. He said, ‘Niggas should always be happy.’ But, what he’s saying is he recognizes the existential state, the ontology of being Black in America.
“He’s not just saying that he was ear hustling. He’s actually saying he recognizes something about the existential state of being Black in America, which is you’re struggling with the crisis of constantly feeling like to be happy is to betray yourself. But then to accept the state of sorrow is to risk some kind of engagement with the noose, right?”
“Your works often discuss the aftermath of incarceration. What do you think is most often overlooked in the conversation about re-entry for formerly incarcerated individuals?”
“You imagine that re-entry should be like passing through any archway, where the archway is a memory — you’ve gone through it. But I think what happens is, with prison, you constantly walking every day through 1,000 exact replicas of the archway that you walk through when you leave prison, so you’re never really leaving.
“It’s almost like people always see you as if you just left. And I think people should understand that and think about creating practices amongst ourselves that defang a word like ‘felon,’ so that I don’t have to hide it for you to trust me.”
“I think some of my questions are guilty of doing that same thing. So I wanted to ask, what are questions that you wish people would ask you more regularly?”
“It’s not just having gone to prison. If you were a philosopher, if you were a sociologist, I think that sometimes you get reduced to your work.
“And if your work is really rooted in your life, and the only thing that people see in your life is sorrow, then they hit you even more.
“We get trained to ask questions because that’s how we’re trained to ask questions. It’s not anything people should apologize about.
“But I do think that prison has had the profound impact on my life that people believe it has. I think there are questions about how I’ve come to navigate the space of fatherhood that matter, and I think there’s certain kinds of expertises that I’ve developed that might be meaningful in terms of thinking about what the re-entry experience would have been.”
“In your poems, like ‘When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving,’ you explore feelings of Black rage and the haunting of Black loss. How does your poetry engage with the notion of memory — both in terms of personal recollection and the collective memory of Black Americans and those who’ve been incarcerated?”
“I really like the last part — the collective memory of Black Americans, those who have been incarcerated — because I think in some ways, that is the central focus of my work. And I explore it through the ‘I.’
“I contain multitudes. But, I’m thinking literally about I as in, Reginald Dwayne Betts, but more specifically as in, Black America, but also the larger human consciousness.
“I feel like when you’re a poet — because frequently the poems only have one character — if that character is always you, you get to be lovely and not flawed enough. And also, your range is limited by the fact that you’re only talking about yourself. So I’ve taken pains to really make the speakers of my poems be more than me.
“That does two things. As a writer, it forces me to try to embody and understand what it feels to be x, right? But also, I go in public and I have people saying things about me that aren’t true, and I gotta learn how to deal with it.”
“So I think, as an artist, this work, the aesthetic that I’ve chosen, has allowed me to think about the full bandwidth of humanity and how to explore that.”
“You’ve spoken about the transformative power of books and literature during your time incarcerated and how those books became a key part of your self-liberation. How does your experience inform your belief in the power of storytelling as resistance? What do you think is at stake in this moment for future generations?”
“At one of the prisons where I was at, where the first library was shut down, one of the first books I read was this novel. It was set in Russia, and it was in a prison, and they communicated, tap tap tap, through taps in the wall because the steel was so thick they couldn’t talk.
“I had been in a prison where the steel was so thick in solitary that you couldn’t talk. We resist, we communicate, we figure out how to make it happen. And I’m telling you, I feel like we need to focus on our stories of resistance.
“We do not have a single story that rivals the Willie Horton story. If we want to change the landscape and inspect what people think about in America, we have to figure out a way to tell the stories that matter the most.”
“In your memoir, ‘A Question of Freedom,’ and in your poetry, you explore themes of identity and self-definition in the face of societal judgment. How has the stigma of being formerly incarcerated influenced the way society perceives you as a poet, educator, and advocate?”
“I was smart. I was in the right places. Oftentimes, I was considered non-threatening, and I was a Black man who had been in prison, and I was unique and interesting, and sometimes they helped me.
“But it was also challenging. Sometimes I couldn’t get jobs, and it made me really insecure. More than anything else, the time I spent in prison represents time that I didn’t spend learning the things I needed to learn to survive in the world in a certain way.
“So it’s still difficult, right? Sometimes it’s difficult because, having been in prison, it’s hard to really fully understand if the ways people respond to you is because of prison or because of who you are.”
“Who or what continues to give you a reason to fight in your resistance?”
“You know, I was on a call earlier today. I got an email about a friend of mine named Keith, and his lawyer was asking if I would write him a letter. And I thought about him a lot.
“I told the people I was with, I was like, ‘Man, I gotta stop doing this.’ But I didn’t really say it to them. I said it to myself. It’s like the longer I live, the longer it’s people that I grew up with are still in prison.”
Lost in his thoughts, Betts brushed it off. “I don’t know, man, I mean, what does anybody owe anybody? But recognizing that you owe something to people who others would ignore is sometimes a deeply powerful motivator, when you yourself feel close to worthless. It’s a good dopamine fix.”
“What is your radical freedom dream?”
“That’s a really good question, actually, you know, nobody has —”
Taking several deep breaths, Betts paused for a while.
With his hands cupping his face and a quiver in his voice, he finally said, “I don’t know. That’s a really good question, though. I’m gonna have to think about that one.”
— Associate Magazine Editor Ciana J. King can be reached at ciana.king@thecrimson.com.