Everyone from the Greater New Haven faith community is invited for our Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Interfaith Service. We are excited and honored to welcome Reginald Dwayne Betts to deliver the keynote sermon. All are welcome in person or online.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is an author, lawyer, Professor at Yale Law School and CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform the access to literature in prisons. In 2021, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a Radcliff Fellowship from Harvard and a Guggenheim Fellowship among others.

He founded Freedom Reads to provide libraries to prisons and has opened 170 such libraries in 31 prisons and juvenile detention facilities across 10 states. As Betts often declares, “Freedom begins with a book”.
He is a frequent guest speaker and explains the post-incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry and stories. He has also been an advocate concerning the inequities of the bail system in the U.S.