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“Few poets match Betts’s way with quotable rhetoric [or] good advice.… Balanced free verse—with echoes, at times, of Yusef Komunyakaa—prevails, with several ghazals thrown in: The demanding forms in Betts’s first books occur less often among these lanky meditations, where, perhaps, ‘the only curse is anger.’ Vigor and sharpness, however, seem to Betts far more than a curse: His symbols include not just dogs and basketballs, but—a warning? a vision of beauty? an erotic token?—the elegant butterfly knife called the balisong.”

— New York Times Book Review on Doggerel

“Betts invokes canine friends as a powerful metaphor for the importance of life as an experience of collectivity. That he manages to execute this conceit without sacrificing any of his typical linguistic richness or thrilling intelligence only further proves that Betts is one of today’s finest poets.… A surprising but organic extension of Betts’s career-long preoccupations, offering an amiable entry point for new readers while retaining all of the conviction and mastery of language that makes each new collection a must-read.”

— Library Journal starred review for Doggerel

“Betts considers the pet dog, a cherished, always observant member of our world. By referencing the friendly and loyal attributes of the canine, Betts explores other, more serious subjects with gratitude and wonder.… Doggerel is a triumph of surprising moments and passionate reflections.”

— Booklist

“In 2018, an old friend, the visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar introduced me to a new one, the poet, memoirist, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts, over coffee at the Museum of Modern Art. In that first conversation together, we touched on art and poetry and work and life, and then they told me about a collaborative project on which they had begun work: a print portfolio, with images by Kaphar and poems by Betts, that would explore the criminal justice system’s multifarious failings, a central focus for both artists in their work and their lives, and the subject of intense public discussion and debate.”

— Sarah Suzuki, MoMA's Associate Director

“A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity.”

— New York Times on Felon

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and the Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform access to literature in prisons.

The author of a memoir and four collections of poetry, Dwayne's latest book of poetry is Doggerel (W.W. Norton & Co., 2025), one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2025. Dwayne transformed his 2019 collection of poetry, the American Book Award Winning Felon (W.W. Norton & Co,, 2019) into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of papermaking. His other poetry collections include Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books Stahlecker Selections, 2015), Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), and the memoir A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery, 2009).

Redaction, released 2023, is a collaboration between Dwayne and artist Titus Kaphar, based on their 2019 exhibition “The Redaction” at MoMA PS1 about the U.S. cash bail system–the state and federal court system’s conditions by which those arrested, but unable to afford bail, remain incarcerated even though they have been neither tried nor convicted. In June 2026, March Forth, a film about Dwayne’s life, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

In 2019, Dwayne won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his New York Times Magazine essay, Getting Out, that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He is also a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Dwayne holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

In 2020, after staying in New Haven post-graduation, Dwayne founded Freedom Reads with a $5.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Freedom Reads, headquartered in Hamden and employing several formerly incarcerated individuals, is the only organization in the country with a mission to open libraries in prison cellblocks, and thereby support the efforts of incarcerated individuals to imagine new possibilities for their lives. To date, Freedom Reads has opened 520 Freedom Libraries in 52 adult and youth prisons across 13 states. These libraries provide a locus where conversation and community can begin inside and outside of prison walls. They are objects of beauty, handcrafted by teams that include people who themselves have served time in prison and populated with a 500-book, carefully curated collection that includes poetry, literature, non-fiction, and more. As Dwayne often declares, “Freedom begins with a book.”

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“[Felon] shows how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative... Betts’s poems about fatherhood [are] some of the most powerful I’ve read... The black bars of redacted text [in the redaction poems], which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours... For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences.”

— The New Yorker

“Poet and memoirist Betts (Shahid Reads His Own Palm) presents elegy after elegy in a devastatingly beautiful collection that calls out to young black men lost to the pitfalls of urban America. ‘In the streets that grieve our silence, children die,/ they fall to bullets & asthma, they fall/ into each other’s arms as mothers watch on,’ he writes. Betts keeps his forms as tight as his turns of phrase….These poems are aimed at readers willing to be moved and to be schooled, who appreciate poetry’s ability to cull beauty and hope from despair and desolation: ‘They have known cells like rivers and brown and/ Black men returning to prison as if it’s/ The heaven God ejected them from”

— Publishers Weekly starred review for Bastards of the Reagan Era

“Inside silence there is a sliver of light that is the seed of the music of these poems, the origin of a melodic range we seldom see in a poet’s first collection. These melodies move in a harmonic range affirming human struggle with an extraordinary elegance. This collection of song is definite evidence of the gift.”

— Afaa Michael Weaver on Shahid Reads His Own Palm

“A Question of Freedom is a must-read and should be required reading for all those young sons and grandsons and brothers and nephews and uncles who believe this can’t happen to them; it can, even if they can’t wrap their brains around such a concept.”

— The Baltimore Times