In today’s episode, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Steven Parkhurst, Communications Manager at Freedom Reads. Adjei-Brenyah reads from his novel Chain-Gang All-Stars, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Chain-Gang All-Stars takes place in an imagined future where people serving life sentences can opt-in to gladiatorial death matches in an attempt to gain their freedom. Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx are lovers and fan favorites, and as they compete, they are forced to confront the brutal spectacle they’ve become a part of. Adjei-Brenyah delves into the idea of the prison system as a failure of imagination and reflects on the seven years he spent writing this novel. This conversation is discerning; it attempts to answer the hard questions, to understand desperation and the necessity of forgiveness. Adjei-Brenyah is sharp and curious in his consideration of what reading means for freedom.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree and the author of Friday Black and Chain-Gang All-Stars. His Friday Black collection won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and selected as a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year. He currently lives in the Bronx.

In today’s episode, author Paul Harding sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Allie Salazar Gonzales, Development Manager at Freedom Reads. Harding reads from his novel This Other Eden, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. This Other Eden takes place on Apple Island, where the Honey family, descended from the formerly-enslaved Benjamin Honey, has lived for generations alongside Irish immigrants and other people trying to create a new home for themselves. Based on the real story of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, Paul vividly captures the beauty of this island community and its struggle against forced displacement by mainland officials. In this episode, Harding explores the idea of writing into a literary canon and shares his intentions behind the sentence-level construction of his novel. Harding reflects on the process of writing, creating characters, and, of course, what reading means for freedom.

Paul is the author of three novels, Tinkers, Enon and This Other Eden. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Paul has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Michener Center for Writers, and Harvard University. He is currently a distinguished professor of creative writing at Emerson College in Boston.

In today’s episode, Astrid Roemer sits down with Allie Salazar Gonzalez, Development Manager at Freedom Reads, and Dempsey, Resident Creative Writer at Freedom Reads. Following a reading from her novel On a Woman’s Madness, first released in 1982 and translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott, Roemer talks about feminism and the power of her words. On a Woman’s Madness was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. The novel follows Noenka, a Black, queer, woman in Suriname as she seeks freedom from an abusive marriage. Through relationships with Ramses, her male lover, and an older woman named Gabrielle, Noenka explores her deepest desires and liberates herself from societal expectations of women.

Astrid Roemer is the author of many novels including, On a Woman’s Madness, Off-White, DealersDochter, and more. At 19 years old, Astrid emigrated from Suriname to the Netherlands. Astrid won the P.C. Hooft Award in 2016 and the Dutch Literature Prize in 2021. Originally published in Dutch in 1982, On a Woman’s Madness was translated into English by Lucy Scott and shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023. On a Woman’s Madness was recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.

In today’s episode, Justin Torres sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and David Perez DeHoyos, Library Coordination Manager at Freedom Reads. Torres reads from his novel Blackouts which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Blackouts captures an ongoing conversation between Juan Gay and the narrator, Nene, exploring the suppression of queer history through this dialogue and blackout poems, created by redacting the two volumes of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. This is a conversation about re-humanizing in the face of the dehumanization that occurs in places like prison. Torres delves into how life informed his writing and how writing has informed his life, and with characteristic poignancy, he considers the intersection of reading and freedom.

Justin Torres is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and the author of two novels, We the Animals and Blackouts. We the Animals won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and was adapted into a feature film. Blackouts won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Southern California Book Award. Justin was a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at UCLA.

In today’s episode, Jesmyn Ward reads from her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is at once a bildungsroman, a ghost story, an epic, and a road novel. In portraying the suck of Parchman Prison on the generations of one Mississippi family, Ward deftly explores how the real threat of incarceration haunts these psyches and, in turn, these familial relationships. In this moving conversation, Ward reflects on living with grief, on listening for communications from beyond our immediate reality, and on the central commitments of her work: to restore agency to the kinds of characters too often denied a voice--and to grant acceptance to the ones harder to forgive.

Author Bio:

Jesmyn Ward is a novelist and professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds; Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award; Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award; and of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time. Ward has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Award. She currently resides in Mississippi.

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Visit us online at Freedom Reads and follow us on Twitter @million_book

Our guest, Erika Sánchez, reads from her masterful debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Sánchez's writing is unflinching in its reckoning with teenage pain, while also somehow making you laugh out loud. This conversation combines the same qualities, returning bravely to humor between ventures into serious terrain like the stigma attached to mental health struggles in the Latinx community, and the dark places a writer needs to go in her own mind to get despair right on the page. Sánchez reflects on a family dynamic recognizable to most of us who were once adolescents: the desire to be seen for who we are and want to be, alongside the failure to imagine the lives of our parents -- and the alienation and tension this can cause, especially for the children of immigrants. For Sánchez, reading can exacerbate the distance we feel from our kin, carrying us to a million other worlds, but it's also an exercise in revolutionary empathy -- with the potential to reconnect us, and more deeply than before.

Author Bio:

Erika Sánchez is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She's the author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a New York Times Bestseller, a National Book Awards finalist, and a soon-to-be film adaptation directed by America Ferrera. Her poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award, and her memoir, Crying in the Bathroom, is slated to be published in 2022. She was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, and a recipient of both the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She was appointed the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University and is part of the inaugural core faculty of the Randolph College Low Residency MFA Program.

Author Bio:
Randall Horton is the author of the poetry collections#289-128, Dark Anarchy, The Definition of Place, andThe Lingua Franca of Ninth Street. His memoir,Hook, was the winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award.Horton currently a Professor of English at the University of New Haven. He’s received numerous awards, including the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. In 2018-2019 Randall was selected as Poet-in-Residence for the Civil Rights Corps in Washington DC, a non-profit that challenges systemic injustice in the American legal system.

To Learn More:

Visit us online at Freedom Reads and follow us on Twitter @million_book