Reginald Dwayne Betts, an internationally recognized poet, legal scholar, educator, and prison reform advocate, will serve as the 2025 Commencement speaker for the graduating classes of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.
The Law School will recognize its graduating students on Saturday, May 10, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Indiana University Auditorium.

“Dwayne Betts has a remarkable story that resonates with audiences around the world,” said Dean Christiana Ochoa. “His journey from incarceration to inspiration is an example of how we can all make positive changes in our lives and make an impact on others. I’m grateful to Aristotle Jones for introducing us to Dwayne and look forward to recognizing Aristotle and the rest of our graduates in May.”
A Maryland native, Betts was an honors student and class treasurer in high school. But at 16, he and a friend carjacked a man who had been sleeping in a parking lot at a local mall. Charged as an adult, Betts spent more than eight years in prison, with more than a year served in solitary confinement.
Isolated, he and his fellow prisoners devised an underground library that allowed them to share the books they managed to hide from confiscation. When someone lent him a copy of The Black Poets, Betts was moved to begin writing his own material, providing a creative outlet to document his experiences behind bars. His near nine-year confinement instilled in him a passion for prison reform, a cause he’s devoted his life to ever since.
When he was released in 2005, Betts worked for an independent bookstore and enrolled in community college. His memoir, A Question of Freedom, was released four years later, the same year he earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland.
Betts earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College in 2010 before pursuing a law degree at Yale Law School.
Felon, a collection of Betts’ poetry, won an American Book Award, and in 2019 he was awarded a National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticisms category for a piece chronicling his journey from prison to practicing attorney.
In 2020, Betts founded Freedom Reads, a nonprofit with a mission to build libraries in prisons around the country. Freedom Reads not only provides books, but its members build handmade bookcases to hold them. To date the organization has built more than 400 libraries for 44 adult and youth prisons, providing nearly a quarter-million books to prisoners across the country.
Betts 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. He is pursuing a PhD in Law at Yale Law School.