Visiting Writers Series: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Thursday, February 18, 2021 7:00 PM EST

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. He is the author of a memoir and three books of poetry. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery/Penguin, 2009), was awarded the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. His books of poetry are Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James, 2010), Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015), and Felon (W.W. Norton, 2019). Betts is a 2010 Soros Justice Fellow, 2011 Radcliffe Fellow, and 2012 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. In 2012, Betts was appointed to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by President Obama. He is the graduate of Prince George’s Community College, the University of Maryland, the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, and Yale Law School. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at Yale Law School. Betts is also the founder and director of the Million Book Project, an initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that will place curated 500-title collections inside 1,000 prisons across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

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