On March 21, 2024, renowned authors Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems) and Zeke Caligiuri (This is Where I Am) offered their thoughts on the intersection of literature and the prison system as they discussed the impact of incarceration in shaping their writing lives, creative processes and narratives. This event was cosponsored by the Prisons and Justice Initiative.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country. 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.

Zeke Caligiuri is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am (University of Minnesota Press), finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. He is the co-founder of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country. Caligiuri is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center. He is an editor and contributor to the anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023).

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

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