How reading can transform your life (w/ Reginald Dwayne Betts)

“We have tried to create a system devoid of beauty, and it has failed. We have never tried to create a system that is replete with beauty and ask us what it might do.” Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a lawyer, and a prison reform advocate. In this episode, he joins Chris to discuss the detrimental effects of prison systems and how lack of resources and the lack of beauty in prison perpetuates dehumanization. Reginald and Chris also share their favorite poems and books and discuss Reginald’s work with the Freedom Library to bring books to prisoners and correction officers. Poems and Books Mentioned From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler https://www.amazon.com/dp/1416949755?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback by E. L. Konigsburg Free Food for Millionaires https://www.amazon.com/dp/0446581089?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback by Min Jin Lee won’t you celebrate with me https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50974/wont-you-celebrate-with-me by Lucille Clifton Those Winter Sundays https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays by Robert Hayden Failing and Flying https://poets.org/poem/failing-and-flying by Jack Gilbert The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart https://readalittlepoetry.com/2011/01/06/the-forgotten-dialect-of-the-heart-by-jack-gilbert/ by Jack Gilbert A Gentleman in Moscow https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143110438/?bestFormat=true&k=a%20gentleman%20in%20moscow&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-bk-v2_k0_1_11_de&crid=25EF7BC9OJ1QE&sprefix=a%20gentleman by Amor Towles under a soprano sky https://www.afropoets.net/soniasanchez5.html by Sonia Sanchez For Freckle-Faced Gerald https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51369/for-freckle-faced-gerald by Etheridge Knight Featured guest Follow Reginald on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dwaynebetts/, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/reginald-dwayne-betts-esq-494a20102/, and at FreedomReads.org https://freedomreads.org/Buy Felon: Poems https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393652149?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback and Doggerel: Poems https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324089254 Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksVote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Duffy?

  Hi there, Better Human listeners. Really quick, before we get to our episode, you would be doing me a huge favor and really helping out our show if you could take a moment to fill out our listener survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash B-H-Survey six. You can also find a link that you can just click directly on, which is in our show description. Wherever you're listening to this, look at the episode description and at the bottom, there's a link that you can click directly. Please tell us what is resonating with you, what you want more of, what you'd like to see changed, topics you would like to see covered. Your honest feedback means the world to us. It just takes a few seconds of your time and it would really help us to improve the show and have future seasons be even better. Thank you. It means a lot to me and to the team that

• 0:45Chris Duffy?

  makes the show. Thanks for listening and thanks for taking a few seconds to do the listener survey. Now, onto the episode.

• 0:55Chris Duffy?

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today's episode is all about how to find beauty, even in the most unexpected of places. How can we preserve and nurture our humanity even when we are in a really tough moment? For me, reading books and poetry has always been a source of joy and pleasure, but it's also been a way to understand the world and myself more deeply. In my opinion, there is nothing as great as getting really, really deep into a fantastic book. But books aren't just a source of joy. They can also be a lifeline. They can be a way to transport yourself to escape your current situation. And today's guest, the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, I know feels much the same way about reading. Reginald is a beautiful writer, but he

• 1:39Chris Duffy?

  is also the driving force behind Freedom Reads, a unique organization that brings beautiful, handcrafted bookcases into prisons and, quote, "transforms cell blocks into freedom libraries," end quote. Reginald took his own experience of incarceration, and he is trying to change the circumstances of others still inside. He is so many things. He's an incredible poet. He's a distinguished lawyer. He's a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. But to me, above all else, Reginald Dwayne Betts is a human who loves books. And so, in a time where people are reading fewer books than ever, we're going to talk about the power and the necessity of reading and of beauty. To get us started, here's a clip from Reginald's TED Talk.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  I should thank my judge. After I pled guilty to carjacking, and he sentenced me to nine years in prison, I was certain that I was going home.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I waited for him to tell me it was all a dream. Then he confirmed my intuition.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I don't have any illusion that sending you to the penitentiary is going to help.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Do you know what the cruelest word in the English language is?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  The preposition buts. The judge said, but you can go down there and you can make the best of it or not. I figured the judge was saying that I could choose what I looked for in those cells. Becoming a computer engineer was now out of the question. Earning a college degree from prison was just as unlikely. But because of what the judge said, I thought not only of what I would lose, I was 16 years old, planning who I would be when I left. I've loved books

• 3:43Speaker 01

  since I was a kid. And so, on my sentencing day, I told myself that I would be a writer. In a crucible that is prison, I learned to see other people.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I remember Starr. We spent months in adjacent cells in a hole. We were both obsessed with stories of our past and with fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings. Books that let us imagine ourselves as people who chose to be heroes instead of villains. He was a boxer. I wasn't. Starr taught me what he knew, how to train, how to breathe, how not to let frustration and a lack of discipline turn into something that ends up costing you far more than you can afford to lose.

• 4:39Chris Duffy?

  We are going to be back with so much more from Reginald Dwayne Betts in just a moment.

• 4:56Speaker 02

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• 5:32Chris Duffy?

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• 6:19Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. We are talking with the poet and MacArthur genius, Reginald Dwayne Betts, about the power and importance of literature and beauty.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Hello, I'm Reginald Dwayne Betts. I'm the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads, but I'm mostly a poet.

• 6:35Chris Duffy?

  With your organization, Freedom Reads, you have built 629 micro libraries in prisons around America. What do you think is so important about getting books inside of prisons?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I found that one thing, see, people often say something like, I don't really understand what you went through. I don't understand what it means to be in prison. But they forget that the human condition is the human condition. And literature, a good book is how you connect to things that you've never experienced before. How do I understand something of what Vancouver is? It's because I read A Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed. And that doesn't give me a full and accurate understanding of Canada or Vancouver, but it lets me know how much I don't know. And so, I would just say, the power of a freedom library, the power of a book is, it lets you confront the reality that most of us

• 7:31Speaker 01

  will never know enough people, and we want to. Most of us are finding ways to fight loneliness, and we struggle. But maybe more importantly, most of us want a way to better understand ourself. And you don't understand yourself necessarily by mining your personal history in your own brain. You understand yourself better by mining the lives of others, the situations of others, through really complex and interesting literature, even if that literature's a children's book. One of the first books I read when I was in prison, or one of the ones that had the most profound impact on me, was Sophie's Choice. And I remember reading it, knowing really little about the Holocaust,

• 8:16Speaker 01

  knowing really little about what it meant to be Jewish in a time when your life was literally under threat. And maybe that's what I thought I was going to read from that book. But you get to the middle of the book, and you realize that the choice was one that...

• 8:35Speaker 01

  You know, she had to choose between her children. Who do you want to save? And I realized that it was a limit to what I could understand about the world, having been in that situation, to be forced to make that decision. And I began to understand how

• 8:51Speaker 01

  radically complicated it is to forgive yourself for some

• 8:56Speaker 01

  for some things that you do. And I don't think that I would have learned that anywhere else. Because honestly, most of us are fortunate enough not to make those kind of decisions in this life. And so to understand a decision like that, you will only get it through a book. And it was the slow pacing, the accumulation of details, the realization that everything I knew about this character was wrong. Because everything I knew about the character was shaped by this secret that she had. And, and for me, that's an example of how a book, fiction, a novel, offered me a way to understand something about the world and about myself that I could have got no other way.

• 9:37Chris Duffy?

  So much of the

• 9:40Chris Duffy?

  system of incarceration in the United States is not built around rehabilitation at all. And it's interesting to hear you talk about that radical understanding. And, and exposure to literature and how that profoundly changed your life. And it seems like a lot of the the work of Freedom Reads is to give people who are behind bars an opportunity to have that same experience as well. How does that butt up against the like institutional pressure that isn't always trying to improve people's lives, trying to give people a better path out afterwards?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Well, I would argue that in a lot of ways, prison is a black box. And whenever you're dealing with a system that's a black box, it's easy to decide what the system is attempting to do. And the truth is that it takes a lot of money, a lot of resources, and a lot of time to change anything in this country. And nobody's arguing that Department of Corrections, that a warden, a lieutenant, even a commissioner, has any kind of surplus of funds where they could make ideas happen that might change the lives of people. So I would push back a little bit and say that it's not just that the institution doesn't want to do a thing. The institution itself isn't equipped to do the thing. I don't know if you've ever met somebody who wants to be a correctional officer

• 11:02Speaker 01

  or even who wants to be a warden. I can name a half a dozen people who want to be basketball players, who want to be football players, who want to be doctors, who want to be engineers, who want to be scientists, who want to be coders. And so we put some of the most harmed, damaged, and people who have done egregious things in a system. And we do not equip them with the resources that could come from having the best and brightest into a space. And then we denigrate that space for not doing a thing that we know will cost a massive amount of resources to fail it. And so I would argue that what, what I do with literature is literally the lowest cost solution to the troubles that we have. This is an entryway into thinking more expansively about how to radically transform people's lives.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  It's not a panacea, but it is an entryway, and it's the entryway that is most necessary because there aren't any other resources coming in. I went to prison at 16 years old. I was 5'5" and 125 pounds. I never saw a therapist. I just found out this year that I'm bipolar, that I have ADHD. You think that it was any screening that was asking how prison was rewiring my brain and how it was compounding any problems or troubles or inconsistencies in my way of thinking that I had when I walked into a prison cell. And so for, for me, I'm just reluctant to blame the system. One, because the blame game is too easy. But two, I mean, because I'm at TED. And I see what resources can do.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And even if we're just talking about the resources that bring all of us in a room together, that is profoundly more than has ever been done for most prisons in this country.

• 12:40Chris Duffy?

  Because it's true, I haven't ever met someone who wants to be a corrections officer or a warden or anything like that. That's that's not true for me.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, because, and one, because we don't honor people who do that work. So why would somebody want to do it? But if we know that somebody's doing work that's essentially thankless, and we know that it's a problem, I mean, maybe it's just better to focus on a solution and not make the human beings who are trying their best or not. What does it mean not to make them the problem? Because even when they're failing, they're failing in ways candidly, that, that don't reach my level of failure. I was pulling a pistol out on people. Most COs aren't doing that. Most COs aren't making the problem worse. But they all get clumped up in the same group and stigmatized in the same way and denigrated for doing work that nobody else wants to do. It's like being a coal miner.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  And somebody says, well, you're ruining the planet. And you're like, so you think I just chose to be a coal miner? You think I, I decided on consumption? I decided on shortening my life with this work? It's like, no, maybe you didn't make that decision. And, and how can we focus our lens on solving a problem as opposed to, you know, identifying a scapegoat?

• 13:54Chris Duffy?

  Thinking about the solution, thinking about solving the problem. What role does beauty play in solving, solving problems? Especially this problem, right, of, of the world inside of a black box?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Somebody told me that when he touches a Freedom Library, it feels like he is closer to the ocean than he's ever been in life. It is profound what can happen when you give somebody an object that is beautiful. When you give somebody something that feels like art, that actually is art. It was a woman who wrote us a letter very early on. She said, "Listen, I come out of my cell and I look and I notice this strange thing in the cell block and I, it's beautiful, but I don't understand what it is. And I walk down to the steps and, and it's a bookcase with these beautiful books. And they're new. And I couldn't believe it. And I'm browsing the books and then I look up and I see a woman that I've had conflict with for weeks.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  And I got nervous. And then she smiled at me. And I smiled at her. And she says, "In the most unlikely of places, we found beauty in a common barn. And we let go whatever petty thing had been consumed with us, just like that." And so I deeply believe that giving people access to beauty. I mean, we all know it. You're a child, you put a feather or a flower in your hair. You know, we all know, you, you, you, you wear a nice suit on Easter. You wear something beautiful on New Year's. You make a paper airplane when you're in grade school and everybody is coloring that paper airplane to jazz it up a little bit. I mean, it's a neuroaesthetic value

• 15:30Speaker 01

  that, that, that allows us to access joy in a way when we're around something beautiful that's much more difficult to access when we're not. And I spent a lot of time in the most drab, dingy,

• 15:46Speaker 01

  righteously harrowing prisons. And they were mostly harrowing because of the architecture. They were mostly harrowing because of the lack of light. I was once in a prison, yo. The window in my cell was the size of my palm and the length of my arm. What part of that was supposed to be rehabilitative? But no CO, no warden, you know, no healthcare professional in the Department of Corrections was consulted when architects decided that their mission was to strip the prison of anything close to beauty. It was no safety reason to make it impossible for you to look out the window. And so I think that we have tried

• 16:30Speaker 01

  to create a system devoid of beauty, and it has failed us. We have never tried to create a system that is replete with beauty and ask us what it might do.

• 16:41Chris Duffy?

  Something that I have found is a real source of beauty in my own life and matters a lot to me is, is poetry. And obviously, you're a poet. And I actually don't meet that many people who value poetry in that same way. I think unfortunately, many people think of poetry as something that has to rhyme, something that is, you know, roses are red, violets are blue, they think of it as kidlike, or they, or on the flip side, they think of it as totally pretentious and not at all relatable to their lives.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Most people have never had a poem read to them, period. Most people have never been given the permission to live with a poem for more than just one reading. All of the music we listen to rhymes. Nobody thinks that's juvenile. It's all, it's all in a structure that's recognizable. It has a hook, it has a bridge, it has like, you know, three verses. And we get it, and we don't complain when we don't know what a lyric means. In fact, we sing lyrics wrong all of the time. And then people say, "Hey, you know that's not what it says." For real? Wow. I, I didn't know that's not what it says. I like my version better, though. I'mma keep singing my version because we give ourselves permission to get joy as if we own a thing, as if it's not so precious, right?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  So I tell people all the time, and this is what I started doing, I never did this before. I said, "Man, I'mma start singing to people. I'mma start memorizing some of my own poems. And I'mma meet people in the street and say, 'Yo, can I read you a poem?'" Strangers. And it is the most profoundly complex, humbling thing to have somebody say yes. Somebody could say no, and it's just like, fine, that, that means your ego. That, that means that you get to realize that the world isn't just about you and this person might have other things going on in their life. But when a person says yes, two things happen, for me, two things happen. One, I started to pay more attention to the responsibility I owed the person that I was singing to.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  I do sing songs of sorrow, but I recognize that it's always two trains running. And I don't have to have anything I write be overwhelmed with sorrow. I could strike two notes at once. I could say something that makes you weep and sigh. I could actually chase joy. And when you start reading to people, you'd be like, "Oh, man, I need something. I want to touch this person. How do I want this person to be touched? How do I want them to understand that, like, my life in prison was more than a long, endless heartache? And I think that far too often, poets have relegated ourselves to the back of the room. We've decided that because nobody listens to us, we're not going to try to communicate. And I do get it.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  You know, we could have different ways of approaching the page. But I think in a contemporary literary landscape, we have decided that poetry is best if it's inscrutable. And, and I have decided for myself that I could write poems that bring people joy, that I could write poems that make people laugh, and that I could sing to you in public and have you think about what it is that I've said.

• 19:47Chris Duffy?

  We're going to take a quick break, and then we will be right back.

• 19:58Chris Duffy?

  This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Planet Visionaries is the podcast celebrating the people creating practical, hopeful solutions for our planet's urgent conservation challenges. Season six launches this fall with bold, real solutions. Hear from Anna Rathman of the Jane Goodall Institute on protecting wildlife, Tom Pachak on his epic 396 day journey documenting the entire Amazon, and Lydia Oshie, a Guatemalan leader, opening doors for Indigenous girls to access global education. Hosted by legendary climber and advocate Alex Honnold, each episode goes beyond the headlines to show what's actually working and who's making it happen.

• 20:41Chris Duffy?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:51Chris Duffy?

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• 21:34Chris Duffy?

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• 21:55Chris Duffy?

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• 22:39Chris Duffy?

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• 23:05Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. In your collection of poems, Felon, which I loved. I think it's a beautiful collection of work. You say at the end, "I've always thought of my own writing as having something of the desire of the quilt maker. A book filled with thousands of words will sometimes have a few moments, echoes of the work of others, homages to poems and poets that gave me voice and belief."

• 23:27Chris Duffy?

  So I'd love to hear you talk more about that. But who are some of the writers whose work gave you belief and hope?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Rita Dove, she has a line that says, in a poem about Billy Harvey, poem is called Canary. And she says, "If you can't be free, be a mystery." And I always carried that around with me because I thought it meant, if you can't be free, recognize that you are a thing that needs to be discovered. Recognize that you are a person that is discovering yourself. And that was, that was a line. Lucille Clifton, "Come, celebrate with me. Every day, something has tried to kill me and has failed." Robert Hayden, "What did I know? What did I know of loves austere and lonely offices?"

• 24:18Speaker 01

  So I had these lines in my head that helped me understand the world that I could go back to again and again. But some of the lines I have and I riffed on very intentionally. It's like Bruce Springsteen. "I got debts no honest man can pay." It's Tupac eating Jack Mack staring at the walls in silence inside this cage where they captured all my rage and violence.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  I have discovered that if I could infuse my work via allusion with the work that helped shape me, then I'm recognizing that the tradition is the tradition. When I first used that Bruce Springsteen line, a friend of mine said, "Dwayne, I don't know if you know this, but that line you used, 'I got debts no honest man can pay,' Bruce Springsteen used the same line."

• 25:04Speaker 01

  So you really think that like me and Bruce Springsteen randomly came up with the same line? And I was like, brother, you are a philosopher. You riff on the philosophy of other people. This is a part of your whole career. You exist within a tradition. And you think that I'm supposed to be a writer that doesn't exist within a tradition? I exist within a tradition in a way that we acknowledge our tradition is through allusion, A L L U S I O N. But we don't get taught these things in school. And so sometimes we mischaracterize what it means to create a bouquet of references and resources. And the last book in that one is a poem. It's a beautiful poem by George Herbert called Prayer One. It's a sonnet that's defined in prayer.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  It's like prayer, prayer. And then he just goes in and has all of these lists. But to paraphrase a fraction, what? It was so beautiful that I said, oh, you know what? I'mma riff on this. And in this case, the way I riffed on it was to write a poem called Prison, in which I was defined in prison. So I didn't use any of his lines, but I used his rhyme scheme. I used his idea. And people who know Prayer One see this as within the tradition of the poem that was written by George Herbert. He wrote that in the 1800s. Now, I get it, man. I don't expect everybody who reads that to recognize it. That's maybe just for me. That is my delight. But that's what we're building, a delight for ourselves that might end up being a delight for a reader who can get hip to some of the things that's happening.

• 26:33Chris Duffy?

  It's so obvious, the passion and the depth of feeling that you have for other writers and for the work that has shaped you. It makes me wonder about a really technical question, which is in the Freedom Reads libraries, are you picking the books yourself? Do you personally select the books that go in?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  We were a much smaller team when we started. And it was the pandemic. I was like, how do I involve other people in this? Because this is my idea. And it was always important that other people would be involved. I was in a PhD program and I did a lot of work. I was going to do ethnographic research. So I was like, I'mma do a focus group. And it's the pandemic. I said, look, you and two of your friends, get on Zoom, record it, each of y'all get a glass of wine or whatever you drink, and just talk about books. And it was just the most wondrous conversations. Wesley Morris says something about angels in America. I had never read this. And it was like, it's just like a wise person who, who has gone into the depths of what other people would call melodrama, but pulled out something else that says what it means to be American,

• 27:32Speaker 01

  what it means to grapple with something really real and complicated, and did it in a play. He said, I could study this every day for the rest of my life and not get to the bottom of it.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  I started reading the book and it came out in 1996. And I just thought to myself, it's just arrogant and ridiculous in a way to say this, but man, I was like, I might not have went to prison if I knew this book existed. And the book is not a reflection of my life, you know? But I connected to it. And I didn't have to be a gay black man who was experiencing the age crisis to connect to it. I connected to it on like this profoundly human level. And it was just because of what he said about it. And so, you know, for me, in choosing the books, it was me recognizing that they couldn't just be my choices. Because any library that's worth its salt is going to be a combination of books that you love and you want to return to.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Books that you always wanted to read because people say you should read. And books that people gave you, that you planned on getting to and you haven't had a chance to get to yet. And so we did that and we listened and we moved around. And then we put it into prisons and we listened to the responses. And then we recognized that I was going to put every August Wilson book in there. And I was like, okay, okay, I need some kind of limiting principle. And so it became, you can only have two books.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And if you're not named Faulkner, or Homer, or James Baldwin, your odds of having two books in a library tank tremendously, right? And that, that was a real challenge. I didn't even have my books in there for a long time. And, um, and then I got, I got peer pressured by my team to be like, no dude, you gotta put your book in there. And then so I put, I put redaction in there, actually. And, um, and the beautiful thing about that was that it was a part of my lesson, that I get to choose what I bring to people. You know, like poetry is the one place where people act like your audience doesn't matter. And I think our audiences matter. And, and our audiences for the library matters. And that's why we spend so much time talking to people, trying to get a, a sense of what book that they were wanting there. Matter of fact, what's your favorite book?

• 29:38Chris Duffy?

  Oof. I actually feel like that's almost an impossible question. I could do it by genre. I don't think I could do it overall.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Give it to me by genre.

• 29:45Chris Duffy?

  One of my favorite books is, um, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basely Frank Wyler. That's a young, young adult book.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I gotta, I gotta hold, you gotta say that again.

• 29:52Chris Duffy?

  Okay, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basely Frank Wyler.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  That is a great title.

• 29:57Chris Duffy?

  It's a great title, yeah. It's a book about a, um, a girl who wants to have an adventure and ends up, uh, running away and living inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Oh my God, this is so great, man.

• 30:08Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Oh, that's good. That's dope. We putting that in a library. We got a Y E library too.

• 30:12Chris Duffy?

  Oh, really? It's a great one. That's a classic.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  We got a Y library, but we're gonna put it in a regular joint. And the reason is that, you know, libraries have to move up and down. And so we try to recognize that, like, beautiful literature is, is beautiful literature.

• 30:22Chris Duffy?

  And then maybe my favorite adult book is, um, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 30:28Chris Duffy?

  That's a really beautiful, I think that's a really beautiful book. About a Korean-American woman who works on Wall Street and sees the challenges and hypocrisy of that world. But it's just so beautifully written and really fantastic.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And it's a novel?

• 30:41Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, a novel.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  But you notice that, right? You hear the title, Free Food for Millionaires, and you might think that it is sociology. And you realize that, like, novels are literally the best way to have a sociological conversation, because as the writer, you already understand that you have to be more than one person.

• 30:58Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  And, and it forces you to think seriously about the kind of decisions that a whole kaleidoscope of people make, a whole community makes.

• 31:05Chris Duffy?

  And I'll give you one, one last one, just because it's so fun to talk to you about books. It's my, my, probably my favorite book of poems is, uh, Jack Gilbert's collected work.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Oh my God, look, Jack Gilbert.

• 31:13Chris Duffy?

  That's mine.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  He has this poem called Failing and Flying.

• 31:16Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And I read it years ago and I loved it. And I didn't know why I loved it, because at the time, I, I was, I was married and I wasn't thinking about getting divorced. But the poem spoke to me and it made me understand people who go through things in a way I wouldn't. And he was saying, essentially, people, when a, when a relationship ends, people often act like it was always bad. And he's saying, people forget about the summer in this country.

• 31:44Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  And then he says, people forget that Icarus also flew. And, you know, Icarus might be a cautionary tale, but Icarus is also a reality, a flight. And it's just such a beautiful poem. He has another thing called, um, The Secret Dialogue to the Heart, or, and he says like, it's strange how words can almost mean. And he says, I, I say machiko, and I mean, love.

• 32:07Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  And he's talking about the ancient texts of a Sumerian scroll might be a love poem, or business, or business records. And it's just such a beautiful poem. Jack Gilbert is, is, Jack Gilbert's the man, yo, Jack Gilbert. He climbed a, a forty foot tree. For a woman, and then fell and broke his back and said, I'm still in love with you.

• 32:28Chris Duffy?

  Yeah. I mean, it's rare to connect with someone over that. Like I said, it's not that many people who, uh, are, are big poetry fans. What, okay, now I gotta know, what, give me a few of your favorite genre books.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I really love A Gentleman in Moscow. One, I didn't expect to like it.

• 32:41Chris Duffy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  How do you tell a story about somebody who doesn't get to leave a hotel? And you're trying to create a whole world and a life for this person who never gets to walk out of a hotel?

• 32:52Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  And, and two, I just thought it was funny, arresting, interesting. And it ended up being about the indomitable human spirit. And there's several characters that make a mistake and it changed their mind. It tells you a lot about Russia after the revolution. It is just a well-written, beautiful book. And then poetry, and this is hard because, um, because you have to ask yourself, who's listening? It ain't gonna be like, I can't believe the way they say me, right?

• 33:21Chris Duffy?

  Uh-huh.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  But, uh, Sonia Sanchez.

• 33:23Chris Duffy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  I went to prison as a kid and, uh, and I'm in a hole and I get the black poets and I get introduced to all of these writers. And the first two books I paid for with my own money were The Art of War and, um, Under a Soprano Sky. I love that title, because how's the sky gonna be soprano? I was like, wow, sky sing. I went to a super maximum security prison after that. I thought I was gonna read The Art of War to learn how to fight.

• 33:53Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I never finished reading The Art of War. It just was not my kind of thing. I read Under a Soprano Sky so many times. And what's beautiful about Sister Sonya is that she's always written with a lot of heart.

• 34:07Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  But she is like radically changed, you know? And she's somebody who is a voice of peace, a voice of compassion. And she's somebody that reminds me that you can do the thing. And I've had a chance to meet her, I've had a chance to talk to her. And I've just had endless opportunities to be humbled by how, as an artist, she lives in a world as an artist. And so I would, I would say her work has had a deep and profound, you know, impact on me.

• 34:36Chris Duffy?

  Maybe this is an impossible question to answer, but how do you, as a person, keep your sensitivity? How do you not get dulled and calloused by the world?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Oh man, I mean, listen, dude, I, I cried twice in prison. I think in a lot of ways, I grew up with literature allowing me to protect a part of myself, but, but not being able to really access that in any real public way. Cried twice in prison, came home, I didn't cry in my wedding. I didn't cry when either one of my sons were born. You know, I had cried when I met Lucille Clifton. I remember listening to her, asking her, yo, you know the Lost Baby poem? That's riffing on a Psalm, right? I think it's like Psalm. And then she recited Psalm twenty-three from memory. The one about, um, let my right hand forget its skill. That was the only time I cried when I came home. And I didn't understand it, but I was calloused.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And then, uh, I like stopped drinking whiskey. I had this nightmare one night that, um, I had left an open bottle of, I won't say the name of the brand, but I had left an open bottle of bourbon in my cup, and I used to like always drink out of this cup. That was my whiskey glass. And I had a dream that I left it half full and the bottle open. And I woke up at three o'clock in the morning and ran down the steps and the glass was up high where my kids couldn't reach it and the bottle was capped and put away. But I was so devastated that I poured it out and I haven't had a drink in my house since then.

• 36:02Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  But then when I stopped drinking like that, I started losing weight. I was weighing two hundred and twenty-five pounds. I started getting profoundly depressed and I started weeping all of the time and, and, and it was me no longer self-medicate. My first poem I published, I'm in prison. First poem I published was in this magazine called Poet Lore. And it was literally a poem about somebody who had two children. And it's in the first person.

• 36:31Chris Duffy?

  Hmm.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  And it's me talking about my old neighborhood, talking about going back to my old neighborhood to discover what my wife and my kids say has turned to stone in my own eyes. I wrote this poem as a teenager with no wife, no kids, no girlfriend, no relationships. And decades later, I found myself in that situation, trying to figure out what it is that I had lost. And so now I think about how I keep from not becoming as callous as I once was, even as I was successful, even as I was living in the world. I keep from not becoming that because I've just decided that, um, we live in a world where people don't weep enough. I started crying all the time and people act like something was wrong with me.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I write a poem about rape in prison, nobody asks me if anything's wrong with me. Nobody asks me if I'm okay. I write poem after poem about the degradation and the challenges of incarceration. I get on stages and talk about it and nobody ever said, were you okay? The woman who gave me that glass, her name is Amy Lowe. She gave it to me as a gift. Then in like twenty twenty, twenty twenty-one, she gave me another gift. She told me she had colorectal cancer. And I said, I'm gonna write a poem for you. Every day you gotta go to chemo. And at this time, I wasn't depressed or anything. I was writing for her and she became my audience. And I would write a poem and it would veer towards sorrow and I would, like, no, no, no. You can have a different landing. And, and I was doing it for her.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  And, and then the poems ended up being good and they ended up being the poems that I put in redaction. When I started going through something.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  And I'm depressed. And I don't know I got bipolar. I don't know I'm having manic episodes, but I know that like, I had days that I couldn't stop crying. I was getting divorced and it was my only, my only adult relationship. And it's not that I didn't think we needed to be divorced. But it ripped the sun to something inside of me because I felt like I was profoundly failing my sons. I'm writing these poems and I remember what I had did for Amy. And suddenly I'm telling myself, you could write towards joy. Even when it's hard, you could write towards joy. And I started writing poems for myself in ways that I had never done before. I mean, I'm writing poems with flowers in it. I mean, I'd never read a poem with a flower in it.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  You know, I'm writing poems with trees in it. I'm writing more poems with dogs in it because I'm now starting to see that these animals are connecting me to humans in a way that, that I had been consistently distant from them. And I've learned that, at least for me, I don't have much of a choice but to be tender hearted. Because I do believe that we live in a world where people don't weep enough. And I am still really devastated by how many people were asking me if I'm okay when they saw me weeping, but the only problem was the weeping. You know, nothing grows without weeping, not even joy. And once I came to hold on to that, I came to recognize that it is not a choice that I'm making.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  You know, it is like a commitment to living.

• 39:36Chris Duffy?

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• 40:17Chris Duffy?

  It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high performance function. That's a long time to get it right and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more at Kohler.com.

• 40:47Speaker 04

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• 41:31Speaker 04

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• 41:46Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today.

• 42:25Chris Duffy?

  Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times. To go back to the libraries, right? Like you are putting the keys inside of a place full of locks.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:41Chris Duffy?

  So what role does creativity play in liberation? Whether that is actual, like, physical emancipation or whether it is just a mental liberation?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  I think on the very surface level, creativity is the thing that allows you to be in one place and really imagine moving to a different place. That's creativity. And on another level, I mean, creativity allows you to live. See, creativity is what allows you to believe things are possible even when people tell you it's not. And oftentimes creativity comes out of our own brain and not the message that we receive. And you think about like The Count of Monte Cristo and all of these books that really talk about how creativity allows you to see something that is not in existence. I mean, maybe that's a real definition of creativity. The ability to see a thing that is not yet in existence and do the work to make it exist, primarily because you believe it should exist and that it can exist.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  People told me, there's no way that you could be successful in this project. We're talking about in a world 2020, deep in the rhetoric around mass incarceration that was talking about incarceration as a product of racism, as an extension of slavery. And that was kind of the moment that led somebody to ask me the question, what would you do for people in prison? If money wasn't an issue? People can have all kinds of answers. I was like, we put millions of people in prison, I will put millions of books. And a lot of organizations that send books to prisons, they send it in like, I'm gonna send books to individuals. So a person said, how will you do it? I mean, I know those organizations. I've collaborated with those organizations in the past. I was like, I would do it a library at a time.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Because already, the question forced me to think about scale in a radically different way. And I was given permission to dream. And yet, and still, when I started, most people thought it was absurd. They said, well, the Department of Corrections is not going to partner with you on this. And I asked myself, what were they not thinking about Department of Corrections? And I was like, well, people in prison have a high rate of substance abuse, a high rate of domestic violence, a high rate of trauma in their lives. People who work in prisons have a high rate of domestic violence, substance abuse, suicide, as compared to people in other professions. What if I treated the people who worked in prison as worthy and deeply connected to this issue as everybody else? Because we say that this is an American issue.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  If it's an American issue, if it's a societal issue, you can't carve out part of society and act as if they don't care. And you can't homogenize this whole group. And so I had to be creative. I had to push back against all of the voices that told me no. And my real gift was to have so many people that were going to tell me no, no matter what. I had gone to Yale Law School and I wasn't able to get what I imagined would be easy to me after getting the degree from Yale Law School. And so I had already been bewildered enough by my own inability to live in a world in the way I wanted, that I had to check myself and realize that I wasn't even trying to live in a world in the way I wanted. I was chasing all of these dreams that came to me as if I wanted to do it, but I had never had a chance to think about what I want to do.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Whether it was, you know, deciding to be a professor because I thought that's how you can make a living as a professor. Whether it was going to law school saying, I'm gonna be a public defender. I had to step back and tell myself all of the ways in which I was living off of received wisdom. And all of that received wisdom was predicated on no. And I had to start saying yes to myself. You know, we entertain children who say that they want to be whatever when they're three, four, five years old. And then when you become nine, you're like, I don't know. I don't think you could do that. You know what I mean? And then you start hearing that again and again and again and stop your ambitions. Unless you come up in a different household and your whole life, people telling you it's possible.

• 46:26Chris Duffy?

  As a person who sends books into places where often people don't have access to books, and as a person who thinks a lot about the power of books, how do you think about book bans? How does that affect you? How do you think about it?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  If you're gonna ban a book in prison, you know, you could challenge the book. And it's not lawsuits really challenging these books. It's not lawsuits challenging the decisions that are being made. And frequently, the decisions are absurd, but they're also being made by people who have no training, who have no understanding of the book. And are we seriously thinking that people have read a 500-page book that they banning? Or have they read a synopsis or summary? And so the way I deal with it is trying to solve the problem instead of focusing on the thing that will get me more media attention. I make a point really not to talk about censorship. I mean, I once had the Department of Corrections in Virginia ban my memoir.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And they banned it because my homeboy bought 12 copies because he wanted to do a reading group around it. And they just thought, somebody getting 12 copies in a book must be trying to do something nefarious. And I had a chapter called How to Make a Knife in Prison. One of my colleagues pressured me to do a cease and desist. And it was like, you're a lawyer, you're the main one who should be doing this. And I was like, nah, I don't want to rock the boat. And I recognize a lot of people say that. They say, I don't want to rock the boat because they want to get other books in. And I was trying to do other work. I was trying to get in there to do a reading. I was trying to like, get people out of prison. And I was like, I shouldn't be afraid to challenge something that feels unjust. And so I got them to write a cease and desist order. And then the Assistant Attorney General called me during COVID of Virginia. We had a call and it was like, well, can you talk to me about this chapter?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  And I was like, well, the chapter's called How to Make a Knife in Prison, but it's literally about every decision I made not to make a knife and what that cost me. What decision I made not to get a knife. I mean, if you read my book, you see that I have not won a fight since the second grade. I was not violent in prison. I was not carrying around knives. She read the book and they let the books in. A lot of times when we talk about book bans, people respond to what I did at first. It's just like, it's not worth it. Or it's somebody in prison who responds to what I responded at first because they have other things to do. Or the person that sent them the book doesn't have the resources to actually do the challenge. What I say is that we need a more robust system that's spent challenging some of these censorship decisions, that's spent understanding the people who make the decisions,

• 48:49Speaker 01

  and is trying to get a prison a pathway to understand it fully. But then I think that we need to be real too. I mean, there are ways that some books are triggering. We have trigger warnings in college classrooms, but we expect the Department of Corrections not to be able to evaluate and make... Bad decisions, but to really think it's their duty to evaluate the kind of books that come in, because books are powerful, they can be triggering, it is a complex conversation. If my chapter did actually teach you how to make a knife in prison, I'm gonna be the first one to tell you that I don't think that I would feel safe if people were finding out how to make a knife in prison based on something I read. And so I think that it is a complex discussion and conversation to have.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  And for me, I put a Freedom Library in the hands of every correctional officer. When we go into a prison and we build one for the guys inside, we build one for the staff. Why? Because I'm being fully transparent. And so for me, I'm not trying to downplay book bans, but we put 400,000 books in prison, you know? And what I would rather do is convince people to support this organization. And I do not want to turn book banning into the conversation that allows me to do this work, because candidly, book banning suggests that the work is impossible. And what we have done successfully proves that it's not impossible.

• 50:09Chris Duffy?

  You are doing exactly the thing we talked about before, which is like not leaning on received wisdom, but rather seeing the creative path towards the future that you want, towards the result that you want.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying that book bans don't exist. I'm not saying that they don't exist in prisons. They do, we struggle with it, but not nearly as much as people say.

• 50:30Chris Duffy?

  Yeah. Getting the books in is the important part.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  And we have done it, you know, we have done it.

• 50:34Chris Duffy?

  Thank you for being here. Thank you for this conversation. This has really been a gift. Thanks for your time.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure, man. I really appreciate everything I've experienced here, and thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

• 50:45Chris Duffy?

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Reginald Dwayne Betts. His organization is called Freedom Reads, and his most recent poetry collection is called Felon. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my book is called Humor Me. You can find more about my book and all of my other projects at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. This episode of How to Be a Better Human was brought to you by a team of highly enlightened and exquisitely sensitive poets. On the TED side, our library of masterpieces includes Daniela Balarezzo, Ben Ben Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey La, Tansuka Sungmanivong, Antonio Le, and Joseph McBride. Ryan Lash handcrafted this video while working silently inside of a library. And Mateus Ellis checked all of our facts, and then for good measure, he checked all of our figurative language as well.

• 51:30Chris Duffy?

  On the PRX side, they each deserve their own individual MacArthur Genius Grants. It's Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it. Please share some of the beautiful poetry and beautiful thoughts that Reginald shared with us with someone who you think would appreciate them. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption.

• 52:15Chris Duffy?

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• 52:59Chris Duffy?

  of stunning form and high-performance function. That's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more at Kohler.com.

• 53:18Speaker 05

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• 53:45Speaker 06

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