The Freedom Takes is a podcast from the Freedom Reads, produced for listeners in prison and out, that explores the relationship between literature and freedom.
Freedom Reads was founded in the knowledge that in a world with prison cells, freedom can begin with a book. And in a country with two million people incarcerated, the offer of a million books to provide solace, affirm dignity, enable imaginative escape and bridge human differences is a duty. So we are sending tens of thousands of books into prisons and juvenile detention centers across this country.
On the show, poet, lawyer, and founder of Freedom Reads, Reginald Dwayne Betts talks to some of the authors of these books about their lives as writers and as readers, and about what it means to them to be free.
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The Freedom Takes is a podcast from the Freedom Reads, produced for listeners in prison and out, that explores the relationship between literature and freedom.
Freedom Reads was founded in the knowledge that in a world with prison cells, freedom can begin with a book. And in a country with two million people incarcerated, the offer of a million books to provide solace, affirm dignity, enable imaginative escape and bridge human differences is a duty. So we are sending tens of thousands of books into prisons and juvenile detention centers across this country.
On the show, poet, lawyer, and founder of Freedom Reads, Reginald Dwayne Betts talks to some of the authors of these books about their lives as writers and as readers, and about what it means to them to be free.
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.
The Freedom Takes
The Freedom Takes is a podcast from the Freedom Reads, produced for listeners in prison and out, that explores the relationship between literature and freedom.
Freedom Reads was founded in the knowledge that in a world with prison cells, freedom can begin with a book. And in a country with two million people incarcerated, the offer of a million books to provide solace, affirm dignity, enable imaginative escape and bridge human differences is a duty. So we are sending tens of thousands of books into prisons and juvenile detention centers across this country.
On the show, poet, lawyer, and founder of Freedom Reads, Reginald Dwayne Betts talks to some of the authors of these books about their lives as writers and as readers, and about what it means to them to be free.
