Education
Betts was charged as an adult and spent more than eight years in prison, where he completed high school and began reading and writing poetry.
Betts was charged as an adult and spent more than eight years in prison, where he completed high school and began reading and writing poetry.
He was a 2010 Soros Justice Fellow. According to The Washington Post, Betts was an exceptional student who veered off-course in high school, landing himself in serious legal trouble. He was an honors student and class treasurer at Suitland High School in the Washington, District of Columbia suburb of District Heights, Maryland.
After his release from prison, he found a job working at Karibu Books in Bowie, Maryland, where he was eventually promoted to store manager and founded a book club for African American boys, while attending Prince George"s Community College in Largo, Maryland.
He is currently attending Yale Law School. Since then, his honors include a Bread Loaf Writers" Conference scholarship, the Holden Fellowship to attend the Master of Fine Arts program at Warren Wilson College and a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
He is a Cave Canem Workshop fellow, and was a full scholarship student at the University of Maryland, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts He currently teaches poetry with the District of Columbia Creative Writing Workshop at Hart Middle School. According to United States of America Today, he is also the national spokesman for the Campaign for Youth Justice, and speaks out for juvenile-justice reform.
He also visits detention centers and inner-city schools, and talks to at-risk young people.
His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review and Poet Lore. As of 2013, Betts teaches an Intro to Nonfiction course at Emerson College. He is currently a student at Yale Law School.
In 2012, President Barack Obama announced that Betts had been named a member of the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.