5pm reception, 5:30pm program, followed by book sale & signing

Betts is the author of two collections of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (2010) and Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015), as well as an award-winning memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (2009), which detailed how a poetry anthology given to him in prison, The Black Poets, changed his life by empowering him to begin to write poetry himself. The poems in his newest collection describe the experiences of the men he got to know during his eight years of incarceration, and trace his arduous path from a living in prison to graduating from Prince George’s Community College, the University of Maryland, and the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, and finally to Yale Law School, where he is now a student.