Everyone from the Greater New Haven faith community is invited for our Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Interfaith Service in person and online. We are excited and honored to welcome Reginald Dwayne Betts to deliver the keynote sermon.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is an author, lawyer, Professor at Yale Law School and CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform the access to literature in prisons. In 2021, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a Radcliff Fellowship from Harvard and a Guggenheim Fellowship among others.
He founded Freedom Reads to provide libraries to prisons and has opened 170 such libraries in 31 prisons and juvenile detention facilities across 10 states. As Betts often declares, “Freedom begins with a book”.
He is a frequent guest speaker and explains the post-incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry and stories. He has also been an advocate concerning the inequities of the bail system in the U.S. Please join us for this special evening.
Faith leaders from the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Bahai, and Unitarian traditions will join Rabbi Brockman, Rabbi Ross, and Cantor Giglio to lead our engergizing and inspiring service honoring Dr. King’s legacy
Anyone is welcome to join us in person or online via the livestream
Reginald Dwayne Betts full Bio
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer and the Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform the access to literature in prisons.
The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award Winning, Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of papermaking. Betts’s most recent work, released in 2023, Redaction, a collaboration with artist Titus Kaphar, is based on their 2019 exhibition “The Redaction” at MOMa PS1 about the U.S. cash bail system–the state and federal court system’s conditions by which those arrested, but unable to afford bail, remain incarcerated even though they have been neither tried nor convicted.
In 2019, he won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category. He is also a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen.
In 2020, after staying in New Haven post-graduation, Betts founded the organization, Freedom Reads with a $5.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Freedom Reads, headquartered in Hamden and employing several formerly incarcerated individuals, is the only organization in the country with a mission to provide libraries to prisons, and thereby support the efforts of incarcerated individuals to imagine new possibilities for their lives. To date, Freedom Reads has opened over 170 Freedom Libraries in 31 prisons and juvenile detention facilities across 10 states. These libraries provide a locus where conversation and community can begin inside and outside of prison walls. They are objects of beauty, handcrafted by teams that include people who themselves have served time in prison and populated with a 500-book, carefully curated collection that includes poetry, literature, non-fiction, and more. As Betts often declares, “Freedom begins with a book.”