Reginald Dwayne Betts

In 2018, he was working as a consultant for the podcast series "Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice", produced by WNYC, which explores cases of children and adolescents who find themselves in the criminal justice system, and the circumstances surrounding their lives and legal cases.

In 2018 he was chosen to be a writing fellow for PEN America's Writing for Justice Fellowship.

In 2017, his Only Once I Thought About Suicide received the Israel H. Perez Prize for best student comment appearing in the Yale Law Journal.

Speaking at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in 2016, he said: "I was in solitary confinement.... You could call out for a book and someone would slide one to you. Frequently, you would not know who gave it to you. Somebody slid The Black Poets edited by Dudley Randall. In that book I read Robert Hayden for the first time, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton. I saw the poet as not just utilitarian but as serving art. In a poem you can give somebody a whole world. Before that, I had thought of being a writer, writing mostly essays and maybe, one day, a novel. But at that moment I decided to become a poet."

In 2016, Betts graduated from Yale Law School and passed the Connecticut bar exam. In September 2017, the bar's Examining Committee recommended him for admission, after the bar had rejected his initial application for membership. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in law at Yale.

After serving an eight-year prison term, Betts found a job working at Karibu Books in Bowie, Maryland. At the store, he was eventually promoted to store manager and founded a book club for African American boys, while attending Prince George's Community College in Largo, Maryland. He later became a teacher of poetry in Washington, DC, and in 2013, he was teaching an intro to non-fiction course at Emerson College.

In 2012, President Barack Obama announced that Betts had been named a member of the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

In 2010, A Question of Freedom won an NAACP Image Award for non-fiction.

In 2009, Shahid Reads His Own Palm won the Beatrice Hawley Award for poetry.

Reginald Dwayne Betts (born Nov. 5, 1980) is an American poet, memoirist, and teacher. As a result of a carjacking he committed at the age of sixteen, he was sentenced to over eight years in prison. He has since gone on to author several award-winning works, including poetry, a memoir, and legal scholarship.