Reginald Dwayne Betts

We’re very excited to announce that award-winning poet, memoirist and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts will be appearing at Unbound this April. In addition to giving a poetry reading and speaking at our panel on prisons with Shane Bauer and Walidah Imarisha, he’ll also be talking to high school students on Friday as part of our “Authors in the Schools” project.

PHOTO CREDIT: RACHEL ELIZA GRIFITHS

Dwayne’s writing grapples with the central role of incarceration to the American experience. His next collection of poetry, Felon, will be published in 2019 by Norton. His previous collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) received the 2016 PEN New England Award in Poetry. His first collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. He is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 Emerson Fellow at New America. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland; an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College; and, a J.D. from Yale Law School.