The Creative Writing Reading Series and the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library presents: A Reading by Reginald Dwayne Betts

March 2, 2016
Wednesday, March 2, at 5:00pm in LC 211
 
Reginald Dwayne Betts transformed himself from a sixteen-year old kid sentenced to nine years in prison to a critically acclaimed writer and student the Yale Law School. He has written two collections of poetry, the recently published and critically acclaimed Bastards of the Reagan Era and Shahid Reads His Own Palm. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, is the story of a young man confined in the worst prisons in the state of Virginia, where solitary confinement, horrific conditions, and the constant violence threatened to break his humanity. Instead, Betts used the time to turn himself into a poet, a scholar, and an advocate for the reform of the criminal justice system.