Photo by Emily Ma ’25/The Choate News
By Eliana Li ’26, Copy Editor
During School Meeting on September 17, Choate welcomed the authors of its 2024 summer All School Reads, Mr. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Mr. Reginald Dwayne Betts, to campus. They shared insights into their books, Chain-Gang All-Stars and Felon: Poems, and participated in an informative Q&A session.
A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year, Chain-Gang All-Stars explores the corrupt reality and injustices within the current U.S. prison system through a dystopian lens, set in a fictional society where prisoners are forced to fight to the death for their freedom. NAACP award-winning Felon: Poems recounts Mr. Betts’s takeaways from having personally grappled with incarceration and its detrimental effects after release, urging readers to practice compassion towards those who have been dehumanized by the prison system. Over the summer, students had the option to choose between reading the two texts.
Before the authors took the stage, English teacher Ms. Cahaley Markman delivered an opening speech explaining the English Department’s decision to center the summer reading books on the criminal justice system. “I think we often forget that each prisoner in our system today is a human being. It is because we forget this humanity that we allow many different forms of abuse to take place within the system,” Ms. Markman said. She also expressed her gratitude that these books reminded readers to question prison policies.
The meeting started off with Mr. Adjei-Brenyah reading an excerpt from the prologue of Chain-Gang All-Stars, titled “The Freeing of Melancholia Bishop,” where he asked audience members to chant “BISHOP!” every time the character’s name was mentioned to mimic the crowd chanting in the fictional BattleGround. Afterward, Mr. Adjei-Brenyah was joined on stage by Mr. Betts and student interviewers Camila Granda ’25 and Dani Aseme ’25 to begin the Q&A session.
Throughout the session, both authors shared how their lived experiences influenced their writing. Mr. Betts, who spent nine years in prison from age 16, explained how his own life story has allowed him to explore a darker side of humanity in his writing. Although he has not experienced incarceration, Mr. Adjei-Brenyah emphasized that “when you’re a writer, your life is in the work. It’s your perceptions, it’s your rhythm, it’s your energy, it’s your humor, it’s your life.”
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah addressed his usage of footnotes in Chain-Gang All-Stars. “The reason [I used footnotes] was a kind of fear … We’re so attuned to violence. I wanted that unawareness to be almost impossible,” he said. By directly connecting his narrative to the current criminal justice system through footnotes, Mr. Adjei-Brenyah urged readers to engage more deeply with the text and look past the normalization of brutality. His use of footnotes resonated well with the student body. “I thought the footnotes were really helpful. Certain statistics were crazy to see, but it puts things into perspective and really gets you thinking,” Antonio Giraldez-Greco ’25 said.
Following Mr. Adjei-Brenyah’s explanation, Mr. Betts shared how his life has shifted since leaving prison and writing Felon: Poems. He explained the importance of declaring an identity, recounting how his act of self-determination carried him from solitary confinement to becoming an acclaimed poet and educator. “The one declaration that I was going to be somebody in the face of having made a decision that suggested to the whole world that I desired to be nothing … has profoundly changed my life. It has become the center of who I am in the world and every opportunity I have taken,” Mr. Betts said.
Many members of the community walked away from the panel refreshed by the dynamic between the authors. Head of the English Department Mr. Mark Gostalyza shared, “I thought they complemented each other well. I liked how they engaged with something that the other had said, and that led them to something new.” Similarly, Friday Acuna ’26 said, “I loved listening to people who are passionate and well educated in their fields talk. To see two people come together and cooperate like they had, I felt like it was really fun, but also really insightful.”
Later in the day, Mr. Betts and Mr. Adjei-Brenyah visited Choate’s Advanced Creative Writing class to engage with students in a more personal setting and give them an opportunity to ask questions. Students enjoyed their company and perspectives on the research process behind writing their books. “I asked Mr. Brenyah how he did his world-building for his book and he told me how he found the inspiration for the Chain Gang system [by researching] real-life sports systems to create a realistic society and system in this dystopian book, which I thought was incredible and super inspirational,” Connor Zeitlin ’25 said. “Their work complemented each other, their conversations complemented each other, [and] their answers to our questions complemented each other. I was doubtful at first having two authors and then I realized we should do that every year.”
