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First Draft: A Dialogue On Writing W/ Reginald Dwayne Betts
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
W/ Reginald Dwayne Betts
August 19, 2025 @ 6:30 pm – 11:59 pm
FREE W/ RSVP
SEATED SHOW / ALL AGES
This event is generously sponsored and made possible by a grant from Basalt Public Arts Commission.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
ABOUT FIRST DRAFT: A DIALOGUE ON WRITING
Genre: PANEL
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a literary podcast produced and hosted by Mitzi Rapkin. Each week the podcast features an in-depth interview with a fiction, non-fiction, essay, or poetry writer. The show is equal parts investigation into the craft of writing and conversation about the topics of an author’s work.
ABOUT DOGGEREL
Doggerel is a majestic new volume of poetry that marks a transformative stage in his life and career. This resplendent tableau ruminates on dogs and the ostensibly trivial joys that transform us—peonies blooming, a “symphony” of wine glasses, father-son bike rides, basketball, seeing and being seen, surrendering to a lover’s touch. Channeling dogs both literally and metaphorically, these poems trace everything from the companionship of Betts’s own Jack Russell Terrier to the ways we are dogged by our deepest desires for connection, love, and repair.
ABOUT REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country. For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and four collections of poetry.
He transformed American Book Award winning memoir Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of paper-making. In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Learn more about Reginald Dwayne Betts: WEBSITE / FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM
ABOUT MITZI RAPKIN
Mitzi Rapkin is the founder, host and producer of the literary podcast, “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing,” which features a new author interview each week. She has interviewed more than 500 contemporary writers of fiction, nonfiction, essays, and poetry over the past eleven years. Her conversations explore essential questions about what it means to be human alongside the craft of writing and the themes of the writers’ works. Rapkin is also a journalist, fiction writer, certified integral coach, facilitator, and fiction-writing instructor.
Learn more about / Listen to First Draft: WEBSITE
DETAILS
- EVENT @ 6:30 pm / DOORS @ 5:30 pm
- SEATED SHOW / ALL AGES
- Limit of 4 tickets per purchaser
Presented By: The Arts Campus At Willits