Join award-winning poet Roger Reeves, Freedom Reads CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts, and novelist Angie Cruz for a conversation about finding community, solidarity, and joy as part of a free public program around the release of Reeves' nonfiction debut, Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. In lyrical essays interweaving cultural criticism ranging from hip hop’s OutKast to Toni Morrison, with history and personal memoir, Reeves presents a profound and insightful vision for how to see and experience the world despite fear, chaos, and uncertainty. “The peace we fight and search for,” Reeves writes, “begins and ends with being still.” Greenlight Bookstore will sell books at the event.

Registration required. Please note this free event is first-come-first-served, and an RSVP does not guarantee admission.

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Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collections King Me and Best Barbarian. For the latter, he received the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, two of the most prestigious international poetry prizes. He is also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2015 Whiting Award, and Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University. His essays and poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and the Yale Review among others. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder & CEO of Freedom Reads, a nonprofit organization opening libraries in  prison cellblocks across the country. He is the author of a memoir and three books of poetry. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery/Penguin, 2009), was awarded the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. Betts is the recipient of a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, as well as a Soros Justice Fellowship, Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. In 2012, Betts was appointed to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by President Obama. 

Angie Cruz is the author of the novels How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, Soledad, Let It Rain Coffee, and ​​​​Dominicana, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize and a Good Morning America Book Club pick. She is founder and editor in chief of Aster(ix), a literary and arts journal, and is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.