Reginald Dwayne Betts and Kiese Laymon discussion, “Writers at Grinnell,” Live from Prairie Lights, November 23, 2020

Bakopoulos, Dean
Betts, Reginald Dwayne, 1980-
Laymon, Kiese

Prairie Lights (Iowa City, Iowa)

2020-11-23

Prairie Lights Bookstore

Authors and activists Reginald Dwayne Betts and Kiese Makeba Laymon discuss their newest works and discuss the intersection between creativity and justice. Moderated by Writers @ Grinnell director, Dean Bakopoulos.
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty, and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division. Laymon’s powerful bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. It is a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction. Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of A Question of Freedom and Bastards of the Reagan Era, calls Heavy “the most honest and intimate account of growing up black and southern since Richard Wright’s Black Boy.” Heavy was named a best book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, was named one of the 50 best memoirs since 1969 by The New York Times, and was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. A graduate of Oberlin College, he holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University. He is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, where he founded the Catherine Coleman Initiative for the Arts and Social Justice. He is at work on several new projects including the long poem, Good God, the horror novel, And So On, the children’s book, City Summer, Country Summer, and the personal narrative about family and Mississippi, I Don’t Know What You Mean.
A widely requested speaker, Reginald Dwayne Betts often gives talks about his own experience, detailing his trek from incarceration to Yale Law School and the role that grit, perseverance and literature played in his success. In addition, he has given lectures on topics ranging from mass incarceration to contemporary poetry and the intersection of literature and advocacy. Between his work in public defense, his years of advocacy, and Betts’s own experiences as a teenager in maximum security prisons uniquely position him to speak to the failures of the current criminal justice system and present encouraging ideas for change. That work has led Betts to be appointed by President Barack Obama to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Named a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 NEA Fellow, Betts' poetry has been long praised. His writing has generated national attention and earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, an NAACP Image Award, and New America Fellowship. Betts has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post, as well as being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, The Travis Smiley Show, and several other national shows. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, is the story of a young man confined in the worst prisons in the state of Virginia, where solitary confinement, horrific conditions, and the constant violence threatened to break his humanity. Instead, Betts used the time to turn himself into a poet, a scholar, and an advocate for the reform of the criminal justice system. Betts’s latest collection of poetry, Felon, was published in October by Norton. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland
an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow
and, a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Israel H. Perez Prize for best student note or comment appearing in the Yale Law Journal. He is a Ph. D. in Law candidate at Yale and as a Liman Fellow, he spent a year representing clients in the New Haven Public Defender’s Office.

English

Writing
Authors
African Americans
Activists

Grinnell College

2020-2030

United States

Virtual Writing University Archive
Live from Prairie Lights

01:22:24

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