Dwayne Betts Profile
Dwayne Betts

@dwaynebetts

24,978
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774
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283
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Joined November 2009
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Nigga said I got into law school because of affirmative action. Ha. I told him look up my LSAT score, the two award winning books I wrote before law school, and the fact that he can't fuck with me in nothing.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
I woke today before first count. Walked into the still dark morning with my license and my attorney card. I am a felon. Spent 100 months in prison. I don't forget. I don't hide. I cast my ballot. Then came home to ready my sons for school and tell a woman I love her. #FreeVote
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Wesley Snipes paid more in taxes than Trump.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
I plucked braces off my teeth in a jail cell because I was facing a life sentence. That’s how young I was when I faced life in prison.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
16 years ago today I came home from prison. Today Wesleyan announces that I’ve been selected to give their commencement address and receive an honorary degree. And now I have the same number of those as felonies, 3.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
To be white in America and not be bothered by turning all around you and learning your hero couldn’t find but a single exceptional Negro to hire during a storied career fighting for a version of equality.
@cnnbrk
CNN Breaking News
4 years
More than 100 of Justice Ginsburg's former clerks meet her casket at the Supreme Court steps
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
@kemiaalabi Hope she don’t fuck around and find out. Telling somebody: This bread ain’t gluten free? You gonna fuck around and find out.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
5 years
First, fuck your regrets. You sentenced a 16 year old to die in prison and wasn’t a single person killed or physically harmed here. Fuck all of your regrets and frankly fuck the Post for publishing them. “I sentenced a teen to die in prison. I regret it.”
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
Everyone should read this story about David Haywood, graduating from Wesleyan with honors and the highest undergraduate thesis prize awarded by the college. The catch? Haywood is in prison and did all that work from a cell.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
68 years. 68 68 68 68 68 68 68 68 68. Longer than both my mother and father have been alive. This is America's prisons. This is what we do.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
It's official. My book is censored in Virginia. Banned book list. That's some wild shit for real. They're collecting A Question of Freedom copies from the library now.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
I faced life in prison for robbing a man of ten dollars and a night's use of his car. Chauvin faces 12.5 years or 40 years; he'll likely do less than me. Chauvin will do less time than me. Accountability funny as hell in America.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
The first mango I ate was in solitary confinement. Shit was so delicious I chipped a tooth scraping it along to rip the final hits of flesh from the center. Who has a better first mango story than that?
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
5 years
I’m learning that it is incredibly hard to care about people in prison without being in a perpetual state of rage.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
For Black Friday, I’m giving y’all this essay I wrote for The NY Times about returning to Rikers and returning to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and doing both with freedom libraries and a team of folks who care deeply about it all.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
We opened 21 Freedom Libraries across a men's and women's prison in California. That's 10,000 books; dozens of conversations; a young cat reciting a poem he'd written to me; a woman telling me she's been down 36 years; and so much more than those things.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
The hardest part of prison is that it gets into your bones like cold. I dream of prison. I see men and they remind me of the yard. Success is a reminder of how it’s tragic that it’s import is the juxtaposition it has with prison and how I can leverage it to free others.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
6 years
After many months working on it, you can check the story out here. Me and the struggle to become an attorney and good man. Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out - The New York Times
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
The whole point is if we didn’t have so many people locked up, we wouldn’t have to scramble to release so many folks. And that so many extremely vulnerable people have been locked up so long beyond any usefulness of confinement is our country’s failure.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
@ChrisCuomo , this is the height of irresponsibility and ignorance. When I was sixteen I faced life without parole. Your hot take isn’t considered, correct, or moral. Tragedies shouldn’t be the metric for standards. And my law degree is from Yale.
@ChrisCuomo
Christopher C. Cuomo
3 years
Served 17 yrs. for stabbing his mother to death. Assuming he is not diagnosed with an illness that explains the evil...Remind me, why dont you like life sentences without possibility of parole?
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
My Times op-ed as a gift for everyone. So you can read me talking Freedom Reads and Rikers without a subscription. Share! Check out this article from @nytimes . Because I'm a subscriber, you can read it through this gift link without a subscription.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
I really just don’t like being called formerly incarcerated as a part of my title. I would much rather be called a carjacker or a convict or an inmate or a jailbird. Cause to do all this shit and be reduced by your allies to a condition brought on by the pistol you held is wild.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
I wrote this, with three felonies and nearly a decade in prison. And during the writing I got four people out of prison. So read it. And if you ain’t worked and succeeded in getting for people off of life bids, read it twice before you criticize me.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
2 years
Me and @KieseLaymon got a joint book coming out. Quiet as kept we wrote Heavy and Felon in tandem. This new joint is going to be off the fucking hook. And we out for not one not two not three but four NAACP Image awards.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Ultimately, the jail sent me to an orthodontist and they completely removed these relics of my childhood and sent me off to prison with a retainer.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
People love me now that I have a puppy. It's amazing. I mean white people stop cars to say: she is so cute, do you have felonies??
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
When I was sixteen with a carjacking beef, in a city where I didn’t live, the judge didn’t set a bond for me. So I sat in the country jail until my guilty plea and sentencing, first ten days in solitary confinement cause they didn’t know what to do with a sixteen year old.
@KTVU
KTVU
4 years
#BREAKING : Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who is charged with killing two people during a protest in Wisconsin was released from custody today after posting $2 million bail
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Same candidates who wanted to attack Senator Harris for being a cop ain't saying a damn thing about criminal justice reform now that she is gone. And the folks who didn't attack her but were just silent also ain't saying anything. Flim flam it was.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
And if you're a writer and are interested in working with Freedom Reads and giving a talk in a prison and love some literary journal that you're in - reach out to us, we'll get you into a prison, get that rag into the prison and we'll pay you. If you dope.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
Been home for 18 years today.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Entire first class wondering how the hell we got here. Poets in first class. To celebrate I got Jericho drinking bourbon for breakfast.
@jerichobrown
Jericho Brown
4 years
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Honored and humbled to be adding my voice to the work that Naomi Shihab Nye has been doing. And looking forward to choosing some poems. Hoping my tenure is a quiet one with all the noise come from iambs.
@NYTmag
NYT Magazine
3 years
Exciting news: the great @dwaynebetts will be our next poetry editor, taking over next week. And so much gratitude to Naomi Shihab Nye ( @YPPLaureate ) for her year+ tenure, carrying us through a pandemic, an election and more. Look at this body of work!
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Listen to my demo. Also, donate to The Stacks MBP fundraiser. Note, I'm putting up some of my Black Reparations Month change to support this project. I'm donating, as long as I remember, every day this month! So you can always join me! Freedom Libraries to Prison; Freedom to all.
@thestackspod_
The Stacks Podcast
3 years
Today’s guest is poet, author, lawyer, and founder of @million_book , @dwaynebetts . We talk policing in our personal lives, forgiveness and worth, and the ways poems take shape. Check out the episode & be sure to donate to our MBP fundraiser. @wwnorton
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
5 years
The first review is in the New Yorker, accompanied by a dope photo taken by Gioncarlo Valentine. Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Poetry After Prison
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
@lostblackboy @Deardarkness Only legit readers understand the necessity of making anything close a bookmark. You one of the ones.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
My first choice as poetry editor of The NY Times Magazine. Easy choice to make.
@NYTmag
NYT Magazine
3 years
Read a poem by Lucille Clifton, the first selection from our new poetry editor,  @dwaynebetts
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
In prison, I was 175 pounds. I could bench press 300 pounds, squat 400, and deadlift 400. I ate crap every day and turned that into a body that could run a mile in 5 minutes. I got free and gained forty pounds.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
When I was sixteen years old and Marcus Bullock was fifteen, we carjacked a man in Virginia. Within a day we were arrested and within months we'd plead guilty and be sentenced to 9 and 8 years in prison respectively.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Puppy is sleeping. She resents going out into the cold to piss and so when we get out there I must allow a few minutes for us both to hunt. She sniffs the air for foxes. Me for the nights I loss to prison. She finds no fox and I find no dance moves or dance floors.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
9 months
I do what I do. And some days that shit ain't half enough. But sometimes....
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
Shit, Star just left the prison we'll enter 19 months ago. We'll be there today. I digress though. I should get ready. After today, 27 prisons, 9 states, 160 libraries, more than 100,000 brand new books. Freedom Reads shows up.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
I’m the poet of the day!!
@BrownDeerLib
Brown Deer Library
3 years
Today's Poet of the Day is @dwaynebetts . An advocate for criminal justice reform and the power of prose for the rehabilitation of incarcerated individuals, Betts is considered one of America's most important and rising poets. For more info on him, head to:
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Biden says he's shutting down private prisons - but haven't heard anyone talking about improving access to literature in prisons. Haven't heard talk of stopping the trend of banning physical letters and photos.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
I don’t know if we ready for this joint. One essay down and I’m fucking with it.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
One of my brothers goes up for parole today. May he make it. Locked at 17, now in his forties. Familiar list of childhood and prison traumas. But a good dude who deserves a chance to take the trash out for someone he loves.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Around 600 copies of Felon bout to be shipped to 45 or so juvenile detention centers as a part of remembering where I was and many still are. #goingback #millionbookproject #
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
Headed into a prison to open more libraries tomorrow. We show up. Tomorrow, I'll be at Woodbourne, first time I went there was to see a brother I'd have the privilege of helping get out after 35 years.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Can @poetrymagazine publish murderers? Can they publish carjackers? Rapists? What is the line of people that cannot have poems published. I'm doing this gig with the NY Times Magazine and I regret admitting that I didn't google anyone's criminal record. I'm going to start now.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
7 months
Happy 43rd trip around for me. I’m weighing in at what I walked out of prison weighing. Local liquor stores got my name on milk cartons. 2024 about to be special. Oh, I started this ride at 4am. My youngest woke up at 4 just to say happy birthday and enjoy your ride.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
1.21.21 - today is a palindrome.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Yo, a student I taught when she was in seventh grade just invited me to her dissertation defense! I gotta stop going to school, my students lapping me. This a joyful feeling though. I’m a have to find a way to be in the Zoom.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
My homie says: We, folks in prison, ain’t just waiting to die. We are washing hands, finding ways to get a hold of bleach, cleaning constantly. And nah, most of us ain’t social distancing on the yard. Cause you can die from loneliness too.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Which poet you think really did everything they say they did in their poems?
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
5 years
Felon is out, and the wonderful Carolyn Forche has let the world know the book is as dope as I said it was. Just saying.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Spent an hour talking to my homie on his first cell phone. Prisons are disaster and freedom is real. And I’m grateful to be able to say we was in a box together in 1997 and can talk free and remember those who need to be free.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
The case against incarceration seems to always be argued in the abstract or the particulars of innocence, addiction, or mental health problems. The case must be made around actual violence though, or even car theft, or bank robbery. Maybe I’ve missed that major article or book.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
From Amaud Johnson’s Imperial Liquor. Now this hits hard.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Tessa Thompson supporting the MBP!! What book does she love? This one moves me. @DeeshaPhilyaw knows this book. @TessWheelwright knows. Do you? Come see Name That Book, tomorrow at noon. is the spot. @million_book
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
If you know someone in prison who can receive hard back books, I’m sending 200 copies of Felon inside. DM me contact info.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Cutest thing this week. I'm reading to some young cats in juvie in a state white as America. Young black kid says, bruh, you got a lot of poems about whisky, you good? & he was being as sincere. The capacity that art gives us to care about others, even when we hurting....
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Felon, Freedom Edition with bourbon.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
The most important piece I've read in months. This is abolition, this is criminal justice reform, this is why prison is a scourge. It's literally nothing more important that has been written in recent months.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Who there?
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
In America today a white woman suggested I should lose my adjunct job teaching poetry for saying “Nigga please” in a quoted tweet response to what was ostensibly a white man telling me to never use the word Nigga. America baby. Why she ain’t just start petition?
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
10 months
Freedom Reads stay out here. This is Steven, our Program Coordinator. These are pieces of a good 30 libraries that will soon be in a Maine state prison. In a world that seems to be constantly teaching us about the suffering ahead, here is a nod to easing the pain. @million_book
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
2 years
When you get to leave when you want but you carry some of what was inside with you.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Tessa Thompson and Fiona Apple came through for me and the Million Book Project and millions of people in prison across this country. I can't be more humble or appreciative. Come check us out tomorrow.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
5 years
Second, isn’t it time to center a national conversation around sentencing practices in America? Why was 200 years even possible in this case? What does 200 years even mean? Wouldn’t a firing squad be more efficient?
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
My event was in Kansas City tonight, at the public library. I got sentenced in 1997, the same year as Bostic, for essentially the same crime. I was sentenced to 9 years. I have a Yale law degree, published 4 books, married, children, coached little league ball.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Two white men today told me they were disappointed in me. I deeply regret not responding: nigga, I'm disappointed in slavery.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
I woke up to a lot of blanket statements about the Chauvin verdict equaling accountability because prison will follow. Prison is punishment and Chauvin needs to do a bid. I won’t call that accountability. Cause we know accountability is necessary and next you’ll say prison is.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Yesterday, after 24 years, Rojai Fentress was pardoned. That’s three of my guys pulling life sentences out since December. More to come.
@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Somebody told me that I should prioritize getting people out of prison. Reason number 1 I don’t talk to strangers on twitter.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
We out here.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
#PuppyDay Yes, I have become that dude.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
2 years
Was in Logan Correctional Center yesterday. The night before I’d been in a car accident, but I’d gone from the ER to the airport like Paul Pierce returning to the game in a wheelchair. Went to the prison and we opened up five libraries. The prison, a women’s joint, just like many
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
When I met Lucille Clifton, I sat in the front row and asked her question and question about poems she’d written before my birth. And then walking back to my room I wept uncontrollably for the first time since the first morning I woke up in handcuffs. This matters.
@MellonFdn
Mellon Foundation
4 years
In 2021, the former Baltimore home of poet Lucille Clifton will open as a space for aspiring and established #writers and #artists : #MellonGrantee
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
This the first contemporary book I’ve really wanted to give my son. @KieseLaymon has published or republished some @shit I needed as a precocious shit talking teenager. It’s soul in this joint. Shit like a good meal though, you want to slow it down.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
It’s fucked up that the prison system made the knowledge of how to make a knife relevant and mandatory, and wants to ban a book I wrote that explicitly rejected that violence.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
First book on writing chosen for the Million Book Project? @ANNELAMOTT Bird by Bird. I think it’s fitting to know this book will be in prisons and juvenile detention centers in every state in the country.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
2 years
I was teaching @KieseLaymon work when I was an unemployable teaching an all white class in a MA community college. Homie been a genius and meeting him about all social media gifted me. Generous and wise and a dope ass writer.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
After 24 years, my man comes home and says everything feels like it had a child safety device on it. He got falsely convicted at 16. Came home a week ago. That’s my free speech.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
25 days
At 4am, my youngest walks into my room. Dad, what are you doing? Writing a pom, it's about you. Want to hear it? That's beautiful, he says taking my laptop and cutting off lights. Now get some sleep dad, the poems will be there when the sun comes up....
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
Another one of my guys was denied parole. Might as well admit the losses too. Sometimes all we got is losses to remind us we are here. We back at it though. Until they free. And fuck whoever said all I do is write about prison.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
I can't front. I'm infuriated that Between the World and Me; The Hate U Give; and Children of the Blood and Bone are still hardback only. So basically, the publishers said fuck people in prison where you can't get hardback books.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
I got tenure from my fam today. Was a bit shaky. But Terese and the boys gave me lifetime run as husband, partner, and father. Then I got a note saying this can flip to at-will engagement whenever whenever.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Fifteen years ago today me and Terese met in this store where I was then working. She walked into the store to buy this book for class. Today we celebrating 12 years of marriage. Black books matter and the study of black folks matter.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 months
Woke up at 1am, banged out 10 miles in the rain. Finishing up this piece that's going to make me uncomfortable. Wanted to say though, March 4, 2024 I was back in a prison. 19 years after the March 4th when I first walked free out of a prison. We brought Freedom Libraries and us.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
5 years
I’m in The Paris Review!! Interviewed by the inimitable Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Me and her been in the thick of this poetry literature what it do since neither of us had more than a poem published. Really dope to have done this!
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Kid says to me, what are you? 24?? Nah man, I’m 40. Oh shit that’s old. I mean I’ve seen older, but that’s old.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Oh yeah, we got a thousand copies of Post Colonial Love Song by @NatalieGDiaz bout to be sent to a prison near you. And that’s cause she been deserved of all we got to give. Congratulations my friend. You been on all the lists that matter.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
On Covid and prison: it decimated my whole dorm. One dude, he died. One, two, three just back from hospital. They got the respirators with them. It’s fucked up.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
1,000 copies of @JasonReynolds83 Long Way Down, the novel. Headed to those struggling for their freedom. #millionbookproject
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
3 years
Going to get that puppy!
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
1 year
My latest in The NY Times, a meditation on the life of Elijah Gomez. Please read, share, and remember what we know: guns are destroying our communities.
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@dwaynebetts
Dwayne Betts
4 years
Got some news. A few days ago I got my second amendment rights back. The prosecutor called me a super citizen.
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