Coffee Talk with Reginald Dwayne Betts and Yoruba Richen

Coffee Talk with Reginald Dwayne Betts and Yoruba Richen

Come join us at Fulton Street Books & Coffee for an intimate coffee talk with acclaimed author/Tulsa LiteFest keynot speaker/performer Reginald Dwayne Betts and Yoruba Richen. Get ready for a morning filled with stimulating conversations, insightful discussions, and of course, plenty of coffee! Don't miss out on this chance to connect with fellow book lovers who are also motivated to use their art and voice for creating and sustainting impactful changes.

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 Pr*son and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning 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 Pr*son 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.

Betts will be performing the 2025 Tulsa LitFest kenynote on OSU-Tulsa campus and offering a craft talk on constraints. Click here for more details:

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Yoruba Richen is a Peabody award-winning documentary filmmaker who was awarded the Trailblazer award by Black Public Media. Her work has been featured on multiple outlets, including Netflix, MSNBC, Peacock and FX/Hulu. Her film, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a Gracie Award and was honored by the Television Academy. Other recent work include the Emmy-nominated films , How It Feels to Be Free; The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show and Green Book: Guide to Freedom. Her film, The Killing of Breonna Taylor won an NAACP Image Award. Her films The New Black and Promised Land won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS's Independent Lens and P.O.V. Yoruba’s other work include directing an episode of the award-winning series Black and Missing for HBO and High on the Hog for Netflix. She most recently directed The Fall of Diddy for ID and HBO Max. Yoruba is a recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker’s Award and is the Founding Director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Richen's films "The Cost of Inheritance" and "American Genocide" will be screening for free during Tulsa LitFest. Click here for more details:

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