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    • Students from Betts’s poetry class introduce him to the audience.

    • Betts performs his one-man-show Felon: An American Washi Tale in the Townsend Auditorium.

Dwayne Betts Performs Felon: An American Washi Tale

Sophie Denny ’24 Assistant News Editor
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a Yale Law graduate, the founder and director of Freedom Reads, and the most recent Hopkins Writer in Residence.
All of these accomplishments came after serving a nine-year prison sentence, which started when he was only 16. Betts’s work speaks about mass incarceration, and his newest collection of poems, Felon, places a heavy emphasis on the aftermath. On May 18, Betts performed his solo show, Felon: An American Washi Tale in which he presented poems from Felon and added a special focus on paper and its value in prison.

This idea of paper as an integral part of prison life was especially true for Betts, who learned to love reading and writing during his years of incarceration. In the stage show Felon, Betts demonstrates the measures he took to reading his first contraband book in prison. Betts recalls this experience and enacts how he yelled, “Yo lemme get a book” down the corridor of cells, to which a reply echoed “What cell?” Whooshing sounds filled the auditorium, the sound of a paperback poetry collection sliding down the imagined cell block. This book, The Black Poets, an anthology by Dudley Randall, became a catalyst and marker for Betts’s love of poetry. Ben Simon ’24 attended the show and was impressed with Betts’s confidence: “What stood out to me was his authenticity. Even if the message wasn’t entirely PC or what the audience wanted to hear, he would still say it anyway.” Isabel Pizzaro ’24 also was inspired by the impact of Betts’s work: “Being able to hear him talk about friendships he made in prison and how he was able to help so many of his friends with his law degree was incredibly interesting to me.”

Throughout Betts’s time as the Hopkins Writer in Residence, he has taught poetry electives and sat in on many high school English classes. One of Betts’s poetry students, Andrew Sack, says of the class he took last spring, “[Betts] was incredibly honest when we workshopped our poems. He was encouraging, and tried to look for bright spots in even the worst of poems, but nonetheless did not shy away from pointing out critiques. Betts’s comprehensive repertoire of poems, poets, and styles shows itself through every conversation you have with him—the man is poetry.” Betts, who came to the written word through lived experience, emphasizes the connection between writing and life: “I don’t think anybody necessarily has a hard time starting [a piece of writing] ... I think we’ve all already started. The art and act of writing is not something that is simply a product of what you do when you sit down at the page. The art and act of writing extends out to the work you are doing by living, by breathing, by talking, by thinking about what you want to be and do in this world."

Felon explores the making of a man after incarceration and separating oneself from the label of “felon.” Says Betts, “What do we mean when we call someone a felon? What does that encompass?” He shares the internal revelation of finding and discovering yourself apart from the title: “I don’t think [“felon”] is a blanket term. I think it means something very specific, but I think we turn it into a blanket term; we want it to be more than it does. It is not a marker for who you are. It is not a marker for your character. It’s a marker for a thing that you’ve done.”

Betts continues to fight for criminal justice with his non-profit Freedom Reads, an organization that works to put more libraries in prison to encourage education and the love for literature. Of the impact of his non-profit, Betts told Boston NPR affiliate WBUR, “The library installation is an opportunity for the world to see something ... beautiful that was created first for people in prison to make an argument, a case for the need for beauty in prisons and to make an argument and a case for the way that books provide people with a resource to access dignity and affirm their own dignity.”
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