Works
Felon
In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion.
Bastards of the Reagan Era
Bastards of the Reagan Era by Reginald Dwayne Betts is the winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award in Poetry, the 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year for Poetry, a winner of the National Council on Crime & Delinquency’s (NCCD) 2016 Media for a Just Society Award, the 2016 Housatonic Book Award, Bronze Winner of a Human Relations Indie Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award, made Library Journal’s “Best Books 2015: Poetry” list, and was a finalist for both the 2016 Firecracker Award in Poetry and the 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry.
A Question of Freedom
A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts’s years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts’s survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.
Shahid Reads His Own Palm
Featured on Poetry in America by PBS
A Must-Read Title for the National Book Foundation’s Literature for Justice Initiative
“Betts doesn’t just have a powerful story to tell. He is a true poet who can write a ghazal that sings, howls, rhymes, and resonates in memory years after it was first read.”
—Jericho Brown, On the Seawall
