Freedom Reads is a first-of-its-kind organization that uses literature to confront the hopelessness and desperation that accompany time served in prison. The aim of the organization is to place millions of books into prisons by installing a 500-book, micro-library in every prison dormitory and housing unit in the United States. In the tradition of Freedom Schools and Freedom Riders, the libraries are named Freedom Libraries because of the organizational belief that freedom begins with a book. Founded in 2020 with a $5.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, Freedom Reads is the only organization in the country with a mission to provide a specially curated library to people in prison and in doing so radically transform the means by which li