MAMADI DOUMBOUYA PHOTO
Dwayne Betts (right) and his 2019 poetry collection, Felon.
Local poet, lawyer, and criminal justice reform advocate Dwayne Betts can add another title to that list — “genius,” now that he’s been tapped as one of 25 Americans to receive the prestigious MacArthur fellowship award.
Betts received that honor Tuesday.
The 40-year-old nationally renowned author and state Criminal Justice Commission member has long centered his own story of incarceration as a teenager when talking about his love of literature — and his commitment to advocating for the rights of those behind bars.
Thomas Breen file photo
Betts (center) with WNHH Criminal Justice Insider hosts Jeff Grant and Babz Rawls-Ivy.
Click here for a full story about his literary awakening based on an early 2020 interview he did on WNHH’s “Criminal Justice Insider” program.
“My life was changed by a book,” Betts said during that interview when talking about how someone slipped the anthology The Black Poets under his door while he was in the middle of a six-month stint in solitary confinement.
“I’m like, ‘Wait,’” Betts recalled upon first reading the anthology. “Etheridge Knight did time in prison. Then he became a poet. And he’s in this book. And I just told myself, I’m gonna be a poet. And that’s when I started writing poetry really seriously. That was 1998. And from that point on, I’ve been a poet.”
Click here for a Washington Post story about how Betts found out, much to his surprise, that he had won a MacArthur genius grant.
The award comes with a $625,000 cash prize that recipients can spend as they wish.
Previous New Haven MacArthur geniuses include local artist and NXTHVN co-founder Titus Kaphar—with whom Betts collaborated on a painting-and-poetry exhibition in Dixwell last year.