The Freedom Takes

In today’s episode, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Steven Parkhurst, Communications Manager at Freedom Reads. Adjei-Brenyah reads from his novel Chain-Gang All-Stars , which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Chain-Gang All-Stars takes place...

In today’s episode, author Paul Harding sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Allie Salazar Gonzales, Development Manager at Freedom Reads. Harding reads from his novel This Other Eden, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. This Other Eden takes place on Apple Island, wh...

In today’s episode, Astrid Roemer sits down with Allie Salazar Gonzalez, Development Manager at Freedom Reads, and Dempsey, Resident Creative Writer at Freedom Reads. Following a reading from her novel On a Woman’s Madness, first released in 1982 and translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott, Roemer talks about feminism and the power of her words. On a Woman’s Madness was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside...

In today’s episode, Justin Torres sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and David Perez DeHoyos, Library Coordination Manager at Freedom Reads. Torres reads from his novel Blackouts which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Blackouts captures an ongoing conversation between Juan...

In today’s episode, Jesmyn Ward reads from her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing , which is at once a bildungsroman, a ghost story, an epic, and a road novel. In portraying the suck of Parchman Prison on the generations of one Mississippi family, Ward deftly explores how the real threat of incarceration haunts these psyches and, in turn, these familial relationships. In this moving conversation, W...

Our guest, Erika Sánchez, reads from her masterful debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter . Sánchez's writing is unflinching in its reckoning with teenage pain, while also somehow making you laugh out loud. This conversation combines the same qualities, returning bravely to humor between ventures into serious terrain like the stigma attached to mental health struggles in t...

Today's bonus episode of The Freedom Takes is a collaboration with the National Book Foundation. Over the last three years, the foundation's Literature for Justice committees have curated thought-provoking reading lists on the topic of mass incarceration. Dwayne is a former committee member and a selected author. The Foundation has partnered with Freedom Reads to send Literature for Justice titles...

Author Bio: Randall Horton is the author of the poetry collections #289-128, Dark Anarchy, The Definition of Place, and The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street . His memoir, Hook , was the winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. Horton currently a Professor of English at the University of New Haven. He’s received numerous awards, including the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the...

Author Bio Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec , was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Her most recent collection, Postcolonial Love Poem ,was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundati...

Author Bio: Deesha Philyaw is an author, columnist, essayist, and public speaker. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies won the Story Prize (2020/2021), was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a 2021 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, a...

Celebrated author, musician, and screenwriter James McBride, speaks directly to our primary audience -- people in prison -- about moving past regret in life, finding freedom in books, claiming power in knowledge. He also offers a micro-lesson on the varying ways to tell a story -- from his piano bench. McBride is the author of a number of celebrated books, including The Good Lord Bird, which won t...

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 Que...

Miriam Toews is the best-selling and award-winning author of eight books, including her most recent work, Women Talking -- the heartbreaking, philosophical, and funny account of female crime victims defining justice for themselves. It is both a good story, and the kind of good story that gets into the marrow of readers: the kind for which Toews is renowned. On today's show, Toews discusses the mak...

Rion Amilcar Scott is an award-winning writer who turns a short story into deep glimpses inside the souls of Black folks. Over two collections of stories, Insurrections and The World Does Not Require You, Scott has created a world-- literally -- in the Cross River of his invention: a spot in Maryland where a triumphant slave rebellion led to the founding of a city. And in creating that world, he h...

Our host Reginald Dwayne Betts chops it up with Jason Reynolds, a beloved author of young adult fiction and poetry. Jason has won all the prizes that dope writers get, including the Kirkus Prize and the Coretta Scott King Honor. In the inaugural episode of The Freedom Takes, Dwayne and Jason discuss their common roots in PG County, Maryland; the importance of literature in the lives of young peopl...