Freedom libraries designed to liberate the minds of prisoners 

Earlier this summer, the Mellon Foundation — the largest humanities philanthropy in the United States — announced it was shifting its mission to focus more on social justice. It backed up that announcement with a $5.3 million grant to fund a collection of books to be placed in 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across all 50 states.

The Million Book Project was dreamed up by poet and legal scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts. It intends to curate a capsule collection of 500 books — Betts calls them “freedom libraries” — that will include literature, history, poetry and social thought, with an emphasis on books by Black writers and thinkers.

Thursday morning, MPR News host Kerri Miller spoke with Betts and Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander about the project and what they hope to accomplish.

Here’s a list of books and authors suggested by Miller, listeners and our guests:

Fiction:

• “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood;

• “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison;

• “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich;

• “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” (The Dark Star Trilogy) by Marlon James;

• “The Ox-Bow Incident” by Walter Van Tilburg Clark;

• “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown;

• “The Luminaries” by Eleanor Catton; 

• “On the Road” by Cormac McCarthy;

• “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez;

• “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez;

• “Hopscotch” by Julio Cortázar;

• “Peace From Broken Pieces” by Iyanla Vanzant;

• “My Ántonia” by Willa Cather;

• “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” by Robert M. Pirsig;

• “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” by the Brothers Grimm;

• “The Redwall” series by Brian Jacques;

• "News of the World" by Paulette Jiles;

• “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel;

• “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway;

• “The All Souls Trilogy” by Deborah Harkness;

• “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston;

• “The Ranger’s Apprentice” series by John Flanagan;;

• “A Door Into Ocean” by Joan Slonczewski;

• “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas;

• “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman;

• The works of Octavia E. Butler;

• The works of JD Robb;

• The works of Ilona Andrews;

• The works of N.K. Jemisin;

• The works of Franz Kafka;

• The works of Rick Riordan;

• The works of Ivan Doig;

• The works of J.R. Ward.

Nonfiction:

• “Not by the Sword: How a Cantor and His Family Transformed a Klansman” by Kathryn Watterson;

• “March” series by Congressman John Lewis;

• “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking;

• “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions” by Johann Hari;

• “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction” by Gabor Maté;

• “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg;

• “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel van der Kolk;

• “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B DuBois;

• “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson;

• “The Fifth Agreement” by don Jose Ruiz, don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills.

Poetry:

• The works of Langston Hughes;

• The works of Emily Dickinson; 

• The works of Layli Long Soldier; 

• The works of Robert Frost

• The works of William Faulkner; 

• The works of Etheridge Knight;

• The works of Lucille Clifton.

Guests:

• Elizabeth Alexander, poet and president of Mellon Foundation 

• Reginald Dwyane Betts, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar

To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above.

Correction (Aug. 8, 2020): “The Fifth Agreement” was originally listed under the fiction section. However, it is a work of nonfiction and has been moved to the correct section of the list.