2024 Lannan Literary Festival | "The Writer in Prison" with Reginald Dwayne Betts and Zeke Caligiuri Artwork

Lannan Center Podcast

Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University is a literary, critical, and pedagogical undertaking devoted to the situation of poetry and poetics in the contemporary world. Based in the President’s Office, the Center brings attention to a traditional domain of academic research, but sees poetry as a current practice rather than as a field of historical research. The Center recognizes that “art’s social presence,” in the phrase of Adrienne Rich, is vital to contemporary culture; that poetry, or writing more generally, traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought: it reconfigures these fields according to the designs of imagination. The Lannan Center hosts Readings and Talks throughout the academic year. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

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Lannan Center Podcast

2024 Lannan Literary Festival | "The Writer in Prison" with Reginald Dwayne Betts and Zeke Caligiuri

March 21, 2024 • Lannan Center

On March 21, 2024, renowned authors Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems) and Zeke Caligiuri (This is Where I Am) offered their thoughts on the intersection of literature and the prison system as they discussed the impact of incarceration in shaping their writing lives, creative processes and narratives. This event was cosponsored by the Prisons and Justice Initiative.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show.

Zeke Caligiuri is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am (University of Minnesota Press), finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. He is the co-founder of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country. Caligiuri is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center. He is an editor and contributor to the anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023).

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.