reginald dwayne betts

On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive—our first of Season 7—Chicago-based artist Nick Cave talks about his career-spanning retrospective, “Forothermore,” currently on view at the Guggenheim (through April 10), which takes over three floors and features installation, video works, and sculpture, including recent iterations of his famous Soundsuits; his improvisational approach to work and life; how his art seeks to find brightness in darkness; and what the world might be like if everyone sat in silence for an hour each day.

Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes: 

• [00:30] Nick Cave
• [16:43] Facility
• [16:57] Bob Faust
• [16:59] Jack Cave
• [20:53] “TM13” (2015)
• [25:16] “Forothermore”
• [25:20] Naomi Beckwith
• [29:53] “Time and Again” (2000)
• [33:18] “Gestalt” (2012)
• [33:19]  “Blot” (2012)
• [36:21] “Sea Sick” (2012)
• [43:44] Anselm Kiefer
• [53:11] “Made by Whites for Whites”
• [55:38] Claudia Rankine
• [55:53] Reginald Dwayne Betts

For Reginald Dwayne Betts—a poet, lawyer, and activist who supports and contributes to prison decarceration efforts—reading and writing have a mind-expanding power that never wanes. The author of three books of poetry and a memoir, his prose is intimate and raw. Even when he’s not writing about himself, Betts finds ways to build personal connections with his subjects for his award-winning work in The New York Times Magazine—subjects that have included the rapper Tariq Trotter of The Roots, the late actor Michael K. Williams, and Vice President Kamala Harris. He also brings a literary bent to his activism: In 2020, he founded Freedom Reads, a nonprofit that aims to build libraries inside 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across the country. The program recently installed its first sets of bookshelves at MCI-Norfolk, the Massachusetts prison where Malcolm X was incarcerated, and last month, in a public event at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., it presented the 500 titles that comprise each collection.

Betts, a graduate of Yale Law School (where he’s currently in a Ph.D. program), became an advocate for respecting the rights and dignity of the people who are in or who have gone through the American carceral system after experiencing it firsthand himself. Instead of resigning himself to the violence and dehumanizing conditions of incarceration, he turned his focus to books—many by Black writers and poets—that showed him the depth and richness of self-reflection, and that got him thinking about the stories he himself had to tell. 

On this episode, Betts speaks with Spencer about the long-term impacts of his time behind bars, the current renaissance of prison writing, and the transformative act of giving people who are incarcerated access to literature and books.

Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

• Full transcript
• dwaynebetts.com
• A Question of Freedom [18:39]
• Betts’s 2021 commencement speech at Wesleyan University [25:46]
• Felon: An American Washi Tale [30:24]
• “Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me” [30:36]
• “A Son, A Mother, and Two Gun Crimes” episode of Death, Sex & Money podcast [38:06]
• “The Lives They Lived” [42:55]
• Shahid Reads His Own Palm [01:00:27]
• Bastards of the Reagan Era [01:00:27]
• Felon [01:00:27]
• “Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out” [01:03:01]
• Freedom Reads [01:10:23]
• “Memorial Hoops” [01:16:54]

This ‘Essay on Reentry’ charts life after prison: and the way that others keep your sentence alive even when you’re wishing to just get on with your own life. It’s about secrets and choice and disclosure. And in the midst of all this, there is also love between a son and his dad, a son like a “straggling angel, / lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his / duty.”

Reginald Dwayne Betts 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, was awarded the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. His books of poetry are Shahid Reads His Own Palm, Bastards of the Reagan Era, and Felon. He is a graduate of Prince George’s Community College, the University of Maryland, the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, and is currently a PhD student at Yale Law School.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

When a poetry anthology was slid under young Betts' cell door 23 years ago is when the Million Book Project -- an endeavor to slide thousands of world-opening books to readers in prisons across the country -- really took root. Betts is an award-winning poet and author of several poetry collections, including Felon: Poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and Bastards of the Reagan Era. His Memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison was awarded the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Non-fiction. Betts also served on the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile and Delinquency Prevention under President Barack Obama. He continues to work as a poet, lawyer, public speaker, and artist.  You can learn more about his work here.

To learn more about Freedom Reads, visit https://www.freedomreads.org and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

You can find out more about the author and his work by going to https://www.jasonwritesbooks.com/.