Dwayne Betts winter

Reginald Dwayne Betts
photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. He is the founding director of the Million Book Project, an initiative out of the Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory to radically transform the access to literature in prisons. For more than 20 years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, his latest collection of poetry, Felon, explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record. In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his New York Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 Emerson Fellow at New America and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

You can read about Dwayne's own journey from prison to poetry to law school in this award-winning New York Times Magazine piece he penned in 2018, and about his views on Vice President Harris, prosecutors and the criminal justice system in this more recent piece for the same magazine.

Dwayne looks forward to offering at the conference a dramatic performance incorporating poems from his recent book, Felon, together with stories from his experience, including the origin story of his Million Book Project, housed at Yale Law School and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Read more here: millionbookproject.org.