Felon: Reginald Dwayne Betts with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Prison doesn’t end when your sentence does. Betts’s new volume of poetry explores the lifelong force imprisonment exerts on a person, even when they come out from behind its walls.
Between traditional forms and erasure poetry created from redacted court documents, Reginald Dwayne Betts creates a travelogue of the many effects incarceration casts on one man’s life after he leaves prison. Through verse that touches on homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace, Felon brings into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.

Betts, who transformed himself from a sixteen-year old kid sentenced to nine-years in prison to a critically acclaimed writer and graduate of the Yale Law School, is joined by abolitionist and prison scholar, Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

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