Eldon Ray James

Poet, memoirist, attorney, and MacArthur Fellow Reginald Dwayne Betts recently partnered with artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar on Redaction (Norton), an innovative collection of art and poetry confronting the abuses of the criminal justice system, drawing on his experience of incarceration. Retired researcher/librarian Eldon Ray James spoke with Betts about the collaboration and where politics and poetry meet and about Betts’s Freedom Reads project, through which he plans to install Freedom Library book collections in every residential prison unit in the United States.