Abolition Feminisms, Volume 1: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice Contributor Bios
molly ackhurst (Birkbeck College, SurvivorsUK, Act Build Change) has a practice-based background having worked in sexual violence support for nearly a decade. They love to think about how to break imaginative strangleholds, and currently exist as an activist/writer/facilitator specialising in creative and transformative approaches to trauma and justice.
Anne-lise Ah-fat (Undercurrent Vic, Narrm letter writing to people in prison, Radio A and A, Incendium Radical Library, Healing through Arts) is a community organiser and facilitator living on the stolen land of the Wurundjeri & Bunurong peoples. She loves to reflect on and practice transformative justice in communities she is part of. Anne-lise supports people who cause harm in journeys of accountability and change, and believes that individual and social transformation can only occur collectively.
Alisa Bierria is a Black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her writing can be found in numerous scholarly journals and public anthologies, including her co-edited volume, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue ofSocial Justice. She has been an advocate within the feminist anti-violence movement for over 25 years, including co-founding Survived & Punished, a national abolitionist organization that advocates for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Asantewaa Boykin San Diego, CA native, Emergency RN, daughter of Valerie Boykin and granddaughter of Bertha Brandy. Her poetry combines her love of words, storytelling, and resistance. Exploring topics like; space-travel, black-femme militancy,& motherhood, which describes her first full length poetry collection, “Love, Lyric and Liberation.” Asantewaa is co-founder of APTP (Anti Police - Terror Project) an organization committed to the eradication of police terror in all of its forms. Along with being a dedicated nurse she is also a founding member of the Capital City Black Nurses Association. Asantewaa along with a brave group of organizers and medical professionals developed Mental Health First or MH FIRST a mobile mental health crisis response team aimed at minimizing police contact with those who are in the midst of a mental health crisis. While her greatest honor is being the mother of her son Ajani and bonus daughter Aryana and granddaughter Lilith.
Melanie Brazzell (What really makes us safe? Project, University of California, Santa Barbara) is a transformative justice researcher and practitioner who has worked in both the U.S. and Germany. As a PhD student in sociology, they explore participatory action research as a movement building tool.
Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English & Africana Studies at Drexel University. Her research attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production as well as race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. Jakeya is a principal investigator of an inside-outside research initiative with Survived & Punished California that maps pathways between surviving gender violence, incarceration, and radical possibilities for survivor release. She is also collaborating on a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns waged over the last 50 years.
Lauren Caulfield or Loz (Abolitionist & Transformative Justice Centre collective, Ban Spit Hoods campaign) is an immigrant/occupier living on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. She is a community organiser and anti-violence worker/researcher working at the intersection of interpersonal and state-sanctioned gender violence, and coordinates the Policing Family Violence: Changing the Story project. She deeply believes in the creative, resistive and generative power of communities.
Esmat Elhalaby is a historian of West and South Asia. He teaches at the University of Toronto.
Chris Finley is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes located in what is now called Eastern Washington state. She received her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and is a co-editor and contributor to Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics and Literature(University of Arizona Press, 2011). Currently, she lives on Tongva land and is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Maria Gaspar: Disappearance Suit is an ongoing series that examines marginalized identities in contemporary American culture and beyond. Maria Gaspar, a first-generation Mexican American from an immigrant family, stages performances that contend with the relationship between the politicized body and rural, remote, or romantic landscapes. Gaspar creates disappearance suits for specific locations and enacts a series of performative gestures where her camouflaged figure disappears and reappears.
Joseph Hankins is Associate Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Critical Gender Studies program at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners since 2016.
Whess Harman is Carrier Wit’at, a nation amalgamated by the federal government under the Lake Babine Nation. They graduated from the emily carr university’s BFA program in 2014 and are currently living and working on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh as the curator at grunt gallery. Their multidisciplinary practice includes beading, illustration, text, poetry and curation. As a mixed-race, trans/non-binary artist they work to find their way through a tasty plethora of some kind of undiagnosed attention deficit disorder, colonial bullshit and queer melancholy. To the best of their patience, they do this with humour and a carefully mediated cynicism that the galleries go hog wild for.
April Harris is a writer who is incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Chino, CA. April has years of experience advocating for the health, well-being, and freedom of incarcerated people. She has been interviewed by LA Weekly, The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and Solitary Watch, among other outlets. She is also a long-time member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
Tori Hong: I am an emerging 2D visual artist, activist and arts organizer. Out of my make-shift art studios, I create bold and vibrant paintings, drawings and acrylic murals conveying complex and reciprocal relationships. I depict what we (wish to) abolish, who we spend time with, and what we make with our hands and hearts. I am, without apologies, a queer Hmong and Korean American cis woman. I am inspired by my interwoven identities and my love for this world. I root myself in my 5+ years as a community organizer and 3 years as an independent artist. My artistic vision is to strengthen the relationship between art and ancestors. Through my art, I build on my connections to my late grandparents and to the Hmong and Korean people who came before me... and to those who will come after me. My art intends to inspire, support and challenge others to explore their own ancestral, present & future ancestral connections. I see this work as contributing to the cultural and artistic legacies of my people. I view the act of creating cultures, homes, histories, and stories as a queer feminist endeavor, and it is a task I am humbled to take on.
Eileen Jimenez: Eileen's mother is Maria Cruz Jimenez, her grandmother is Eloisa Saavedra and her great grandmother is Isidora Saavedra, matriarchs of the Otomi people. She is an indigenous queer artist currently living in occupied Duwamish Territory (Seattle, WA). In her art you will see her Mexican and Otomi stories - you see the visual representation of her soul, and the colors, the culture, the visions and the dreams that live there. As an indigenous leader, community member, and as an artist, everything she does and creates is influenced by her many intersecting identities and lived experiences. She creates the art, the structures, the programming and the educational experiences she wishes she and her community would have seen and had access to as a girl from the 'hood. In her current body of work you will see her ongoing journey to heal and to share her family’s and community’s stories. She aims to create pieces that embody Indigenous life, joy, resilience and relationship to Land.
Lacey Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist who crafts transformation spells across mediums. Interested in the radical creative potential of accessible communication, her work often examines themes of social rupture, mythology, and the emotional self. She has been active in multiple art and activism collectives in the Bay Area and beyond. Her previously published works include Green Eyed Monsters: A Research Project on Jealousy, and she is the illustrator of The Polyamory Breakup Book. She lives in Oakland, Ca, on unceded Ohlone land. Mimi Kim(INCITE!, Creative Interventions, California State University, Long Beach) is a long-time advocate and activist working on issues of gender-based violence in communities of color. She is a co-founder of INCITE! and the founder of Creative Interventions, an organization committed to collective, liberatory and non-criminalizing transformative justice and community accountability strategies. Mimi is an Associate Professor of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach.
Victoria Law is a freelance writer and editor focused on the intersections between mass incarceration, gender and resistance. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women and "Prisons Make Us Safer": And 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration and co-author of Prison By Any Other Name.
My name is Tabitha Lean, or as my ancestors know me, Budhin Mingaan. I am a First Nations woman, of Gunditjmara descent, in this land they call Australia and I have spent two years in prison in this state, two years on Home detention and now I am on parole, or as I call it, open air prison.
Colby Lenz is a long-term advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and the Transgender Advocacy Group (TAG), and a co-founder of Survived & Punished, a national organizing project to end the criminalization of survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Colby has 20 years of experience in grassroots organizing, community-engaged research, and policy advocacy addressing the intersections of criminalization, incarceration, and gender-based violence. Colby is the Deputy Director of Policy and Community Research at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.
Shirley Leslie(Critical Resistance): I am the National Development Coordinator at Critical Resistance. After having been radicalized over the past few years, I searched for a political home and, thankfully, found CR. Recent heavy involvement in a local jail campaign was my first direct organizing experience, and it showed me the importance of community political education and involvement, self-determination, and fervent organizing and advocacy for community needs to be met.
Brooke Lober is a teacher, writer, and social movement scholar who is currently researching legacies of antiracist and anti-Zionist feminisms in the Bay Area. Brooke’s writing is published in the scholarly journals Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and on numerous websites of radical culture.
Meenakshi Mannoe(Pivot, Vancouver Prison Justice Day Committee, Defund 604 Network) is a settler of Indian and Surinamese descent living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples in so-called Vancouver, BC. She works as the Criminalization & Policing Campaigner at Pivot Legal Society, and organizes with local groups to dismantle colonial, carceral violence in its many forms.
CeCe McDonald is an artist, organizer, and activist committed to dismantling the PIC and winning the liberation of all oppressed people. As a Black trans woman, and a survivor of white supremacist and transphobic violence and the PIC, these issues are core to CeCe’s life. While incarcerated, CeCe’s evocative and thoughtful writing inspired an international community of activists to support #FreeCeCe and movements for trans liberation and prison abolition.
Erica R. Meiners (Critical Resistance, Prison Neighborhood Art & Education Project, Northeastern Illinois University) is a writer, educator and organizer. Her work includes a co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom(Haymarket Books, 2018)and TheFeminist and the Sex Offender (Verso Press, 2020) which explores feminist culpability and resistance to the mounting sex offender regime. She is also a co-author of the book, Abolition. Feminisms. Now. (Haymarket Books, 2022).
Kelsey Mohamed(Cradle Community, Community Action on Prison Expansion) is a London-based feminist abolitionist organiser, facilitator and transformative justice practitioner, focusing on campaigns against state, domestic and sexual violence. In 2021 Cradle Community published Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons, a grassroots organising manual for abolition in the UK.
Gloria Negrete-Lopez (she/her/ella) is a Doctoral Candidate in Gender and Women’s Studies with a Minor in Mexican-American Studies at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation, “Imagining Freedom: Criminalization, Visuality, and the Circulation of Abolitionist Messages,” focuses on the need to abolish the criminalization of migration. Research interests include: Gender Studies, Latinx Studies, Visual/Cultural Studies, Migration Studies, and Critical Prison Studies.
Ky Peterson is a trans advocate who served 9 years in prison for self-defense. During his incarceration, he fought for trans prisoner’s rights to medical care. Ky is vibrant, intelligent, and uncommonly kind with a genuinely loving nature, and a passion for promoting Human Rights and Transgender Equality. In 2017, Ky co-founded Freedom Overground with Pinky Shear. Today, Ky shares his story of courage and perseverance with TGNC communities across the country.
Minh-Ha T. Pham is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on fashion labor under global and digital capitalism. She’s published in a wide range of scholarly and mainstream publications including The New Republic, The Nation, New York Times, Jacobin, and The Atlantic. She’s also the author of Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging (Duke University Press, 2015) and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property (Duke University Press, 2022).
Amanda Priebe is a neurodivergent white settler artist originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Treaty 6 Territory. She is a lifelong gardener, wild swimmer and perpetual student of the plant kingdom. In her current home of Berlin, she organizes across colonial borders with housing justice movements and other projects of the radical imagination. Her art practice seeks to support many self-organized groups and independent community projects, and her work can be found in radical journals, books, magazines, social movement spaces and hopefully, on the streets near you.
Romarilyn Ralston identifies as a black feminist abolitionist with incarceration experience. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Gender & Feminist Studies from Pitzer College and a Master’s degree in Liberal Arts from Washington University in St. Louis after 23 years of incarceration. She was the program director of Project Rebound at California State Fullerton and chaired the CSU Project Rebound Consortium Policy & Advocacy Committee. She is a long-time organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and serves on the leadership committee. Romarilyn sits on several national boards, including the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison and Freedom Reads. In 2022, she received a full pardon from Governor Gavin Newsom.
Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American artist and musician who uses illustration, writing, and punk rock music as her preferred mediums. Blending political principles with gender and cultural identity— Road testifies to the beauty of the imperfect. Her career began in 1996, when writing the Green’Zine; a self-published fanzine. Green’zine evolved from a punk rock fanzine with interviews and reviews to a personal manifesto about survival and healing from trauma. She published 14 Green’zines and has contributed countless illustrations to punk rock, literature, and political organizations. She’s since published 3 graphic novels which tackle gender, sexuality, cultural identity, and healing from trauma: Indestructible (2005), Bad Habits (2008), and Spit and Passion (2013). Her most recent project is the Next World Tarot (2017, 2019) a tarot card deck envisioning a world based on radical redefinitions of love and social justice. Aside from creating art, Road is a songwriter and guitarist. She currently fronts Choked Up, and fronted The Homewreckers from 2008-2016. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her signature mark-making embodies the perspective of a first-generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in Oakland, California during the era of the war on drugs and the birth of Hip Hop. Favianna's practice includes visual art, public art, writing, cultural organizing and power building. In addition to her expansive studio practice, she is the co-founder and president of The Center for Cultural Power, a national organization that empowers artists to disrupt the status quo and ignite change at the intersection of culture and social justice.
Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo practices transformative mama pedagogies by day while decolonizing chicanx studies by trade. At UC Davis Clarissa is affiliated with cultural studies and gender studies. Clarissa is an internationally published poet who believes the creative spirit ends violence. She co-founded INCITE! and co-edited Color of Violence: The INCITE Anthology andCommunity Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence. Her writing appears recently in Politico, Truthout and Basta Anthology: 100 Latinas Write on Violence Against Women.
Samah Saleh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work and the coordinator for the Women’s Studies Master’s Degree Program at An-Najah National University in Nablus. She is currently researching the development of the social work profession in Palestine, with an emphasis on community development. She is interested in researching gender and politics, social solidarity economy, and women empowerment. She is an activist with many organizations that focus on women, community development, and social solidarity economy.
Tina Shull (she/hers) is an Assistant Professor of History at UNC Charlotte specializing in race, empire, migrant detention, and climate justice in the modern US and World. Her first book, Detention Empire: Reagan's Total War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance, is forthcoming with UNC Press in 2022. Shull directs the digital history project Climate Refugee Stories and was named a Soros Justice Fellow in 2016 for her work in immigration detention storytelling.
Ash Stephens is a Black trans writer and organizer and part of the abolitionist genealogies of the collectives Love and Protect, Chicago Community Bond Fund, and the NYC chapter of Survived and Punished. A decade ago, they became active in campaigns to support women and TGNC people who are criminalized for self-defense. Ash is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), researching policing and surveillance of TGNC people, from an abolitionist framework.
Vanessa E. Thompson (Goethe University Frankfurt, Copwatch_ffm, International Independent Commission on the Death of Oury Jalloh) is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research and teaching are focused on critical racism studies, black studies, feminist theories, post- and decolonial feminist theories and methodologies, critiques of policing and transformative and abolitionist justice. Vanessa is also engaged in these fields as a community activist.
Emily Thuma is Assistant Professor of U.S. Politics and Law at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, published by the University of Illinois Press.
Jana Traboulsi is a visual artist, graphic designer and educator. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut and an MA in Media and Communication studies from Goldsmiths London, UK. She is the co-founder and creative director of pan-arab quarterly Bidayat and the artistic director of Snoubar Bayrout publishing house. In 2014, she co-founded Sigil, an art collective based in Beirut and New York. In addition to commissioned and collective projects, her work explores creative methods of research and the relation text-image as a place for critical thought and commentary, often bridging between the personal and the socio-political. Since 2004, she has been teaching design and illustration studios and lectures in history and theory. She recently joined ESAV–Marrakech as the pedagogical director of the graphic and digital design department.
Abolition Feminisms, Volume 2: Feminist Ruptures Against the Carceral State Contributor Bios
Qui Alexander is a queer, trans, Black Puerto Rican scholar, educator, and organizer. They are currently an assistant professor of gender, sexuality and trans studies in curriculum and pedagogy at OISE, University of Toronto. Their work and scholarship centers queer Black feminist praxis, Black trans studies, political education, transformative justice, and abolition. Grounded in their experiences as a community organizer, Qui views their scholarship as a place to articulate the cultural work they do in relation to their communities. Believing education is a practice of freedom, Qui strives to center personal and collective transformation in every educational space they hold and co-create.
Tabitha Arnold is a visual artist and political organizer. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she now lives and works in Philadelphia. Her meticulous, tactile images speak to the radical past and ongoing struggle that threads all working people together. Arnold’s textiles have traveled to exhibits in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, including the Woodmere Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. In 2020, her touch-interactive tapestry, "Our Sutured City," was highlighted in the international ALT.CTRL showcase at Game Developers Conference, San Francisco. Her work was recently profiled in Hyperallergic and Lux Magazine and featured on the cover of Dissent Magazine. She was the 2021 Artist in Residence at Glen Foerd, where her work is now on view.
kai barrow (born in 1959, Chicago) lives and works in New Orleans. Interested in the praxis of Black radical imagination, she works at the intersection of art and activism. Experimenting with an abolitionist vernacular, barrow’s paintings, installations, and sculptures transgress ideological and carceral borders. For more information see, www.kailbarrow.com.
Alisa Bierria is a Black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her writing can be found in numerous scholarly journals and public anthologies, including her coedited volume, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice. She has been an advocate within the feminist anti-violence movement for over twenty-five years, including cofounding Survived & Punished, a national abolitionist organization that advocates for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Jakeya Caruthersis Assistant Professor of English & Africana Studies at Drexel University. Her research attends to black political aesthetics within twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural production as well as race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. Jakeya is a principal investigator of an inside-outside research initiative with Survived & Punished California that maps pathways between surviving gender violence, incarceration, and radical possibilities for survivor release. She is also collaborating on a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns waged over the last fifty years.
Rosalie Donaldson Kronenbuerger is a trauma therapist and parent of two. The author resides as a settler in Tkaronto.
Romina Garcia is a doctoral candidate in the department of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside. As a doctoral student, Romina’s research focuses on examining the structural and administrative anti-Black violence that encompasses women of color, in particular, Black women within anti-violence work. She is a founding member of CARA - Critical Anti-Violence Research and Action which is a UC-based collective that converges thought and action to end racialized gendered violence through an abolitionist and decolonial feminist approach.
Yola Gómez is a first-generation, queer, xicanx, nonbinary femme activist and writer. Growing up on the US-Mexico border, their activism and writing grew out of personal experiences with racism and violence. Yola is a felon with assault on an officer charges and former sex worker who has sought to use their experiences as a means to agitate, educate, and organize others. In 2019, Yola graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University. Soon after, in 2020, they won Flying Ketchup’s Hybrid Manuscript Award for their unpublished book We’ve Always Been Weeping and Searching for the Dead. Their work has been featured in Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century and the forthcoming anthology, Weeping Women: The Haunting Presence of La Llorona in Mexican and Chicanx Lore. Their work appears in literary journals including Entropy, Nat.Brut, Utterance, and Cutthroat. Despite their publication record, Yola defines themself as an academic outsider and literary saboteur, keeping their sights set on abolition.
Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, sociologist, artist, abolitionist, and mother. Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, activist-centered, and decolonial, centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change. Shana is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist research, art, and activist initiative, and creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement in New Orleans. Her latest projects are SOIL, which interrogates the carceral spaces of what is left behind in and on the grounds of sugarcane plantations through archival research, soil collection, and photography and the initiative, “Theirs Was a Movement without Marches,” which documents the narratives of low-income Black women organizing in public housing and the abolitionist strategies they employed in their work.
Ren-yo Hwang (they/them)’s community-based scholarship examines late twentieth century carceral technologies, abolition, transformative justice, and QTBIPoC anti-violence activism. Hwang’s first book, Trans of Color Entrapments: Carceral Coalitions and Identitarian Violence follows the emergence of hate crimes, community policing, and gay/trans jailing in 1980s Los Angeles. Their scholarship is published or forthcoming in QED: Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Foucault Studies,Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Critical Ethnic Studies Journal. They are an assistant professor of gender studies at Mount Holyoke College.
Jessica Issacharoff is a mitigation specialist with the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. She holds a BA in history and English from Grinnell College and a PhD in literature from Duke University. Jessica has also organized with local and national labor and civil rights organizations in Durham, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Before starting at LCAC she was a postdoctoral fellow in law and society at the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University, completing research on women’s incarceration.
Inés Ixierda is a queer Mestizx interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and community organizer in Oakland, California, unceded Ohlone Land.
Colby Lenz is a long-term advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and the Transgender Advocacy Group (TAG), and a cofounder of Survived & Punished, a national organizing project to end the criminalization of survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Colby has twenty years of experience in grassroots organizing, community-engaged research, and policy advocacy addressing the intersections of criminalization, incarceration, and gender-based violence. Colby is Deputy Director of Policy and Community Research at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.
Brooke Lober is a social movement scholar, researching legacies of anti-racist and anti-Zionist feminisms in the Bay Area and teaching courses in gender and women’s studies at UC Berkeley. Brooke is the coeditor of a special issue of the journal Sinister Wisdom (Fall 2022), which gathers stories and interviews from Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners, a group whose activities spanned twenty-five years. Brooke’s writing is published in the scholarly journals Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Meridians, and Abolition and on numerous websites of radical culture.
Mon M is an Indian illustrator, writer, and abolitionist feminist organizer based in Lenapehoking, now so-called Brooklyn. Their work focuses on supporting organizers with art for promotions, fundraisers, and posters, and features comics, landscapes, and animations. They are a coauthor of 8 to Abolition and now organize for an end to the borough-based jails plan in NYC and support the National No New Jails Network, as well as the Sick of It Disability Inside/Outside Pen Pal Project. The defense of survivorship, and the intimate relationship between carceral systems and bodies, particularly those belonging to queer and trans people, have been an integral part of shaping their politics.
Kayla Marie Martensen (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois, Chicago in the criminology, law, and justice department and an instructor at Loyola University, Chicago, where she teaches classes related to punishment, race, gender, and social justice. Her areas of interest include critical carceral studies, feminist abolition, prison abolition, gender violence, and youth studies. Currently, Kayla’s research focuses on the intersection of punishment and service where she critiques expansion of carceral logic and practice into community agencies and “non-punitive” residential placements.
Dayjha McMillan (they/she) is a dreamer and schemer, committed to the lifelong practice of playing as a healing endeavor. A Leo sun, Aquarius moon, they are always striving to understand “balance” and how it appears in their daily passions. They self-created an interdisciplinary focused BA titled: Law, Diversity and Justice: Critiquing the American Dream using Critical Race Theory, Counternarratives, and Feminist Theory, with a minor in education and social justice. Dayjha is currently in the Community Impact Fellowship in Seattle, Washington, working with WA-BLOC, Washington Building Leaders of Change, an all-woman, majority Black-led grassroots organization and finishing up an internship with KEXP, a local radio station.
Xhercis (Sir-sis) Méndez is an associate professor and vice chair of women and gender studies and queer studies, and a founding member of the Collective for Justice, Equity and Transformation (CoJET) at Cal State University, Fullerton. She works with faculty, staff, students, and administrators to identify the root causes of harms such as microaggressions, relationship violence, and campus sexual assault, creating actionable pathways toward accountability and healing. Her writings include titles such as “Beyond Nassar: A Transformative Justice and Decolonial Feminist Approach to Campus Sexual Assault” and "Notes Toward a Decolonial Feminist Methodology: Revisiting the Race/Gender Matrix." Beyond the academy, she works with various community organizations and serves as a consultant, facilitator, and strategist to organizations seeking to address systemic harm, racism, and anti-Blackness.
Mark Mullkoff is a narrative therapist, DJ/producer, and a father. The author resides as a settler in Tkaronto.
Whitney Richards-Calathes is an artist, writer, researcher, organizer, and transformative justice practitioner. Receiving her PhD from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, Whitney has focused her work on intergenerational relationships between Black women and girls, and how they make home while navigating punishment systems. In addition to academic work, Whitney is a community researcher, collaborating with organizers in participatory, creative, and justice-oriented projects. Whitney is from the Bronx and loves the ocean.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.
Red Schulte (they/them) is a community organizer and zine maker. They helped organize the Justice for Alisha Walker Defense Campaign, are a collective member of Hacking//Hustling, and are a founding member of the Support Ho(s)e collective and of Bluestockings Cooperative. They formerly organized with cherished comrades of Survivors Against SESTA (which sunset active organizing in July 2018), Survived & Punished NY, and Red Canary Song.
Hyejin Shim has over a decade's experience in supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence, particularly immigrant, refugee, queer/trans, and criminalized survivors of abuse. Her work includes grassroots community organizing as well as formal direct service work in domestic violence and sexual assault agencies. She is a cofounder of Survived & Punished, a national organization dedicated to supporting criminalized and incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence.
Tamara Lea Spira (she/her) is an associate professor of queer studies with a joint appointment in American cultural studies and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University, and she is a former University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow. Her writings can be found or are forthcoming in venues including Radical History Review, Boundary2, Identities, Feminist Theory, Feminist Formations, NACLA Journal of the Americas, the Feminist Wire, Feminist Studies, Signs, and E-misférica. Dr. Spira’s first book, Movements of Feeling: Feminist Radical Imaginations in Neoliberal Times, is under contract with University of Washington Press. Her second book, on queering reproductive justice and family abolition, is under contract with the University of California Press.
Madi Stapleton (she/her) is an independent scholar based in Kansas City, Missouri. She holds an interdisciplinary BA in critical race feminist & queer studies from Fairhaven College. Her areas of interest include biopolitics, reproductive justice, and feminist/queer literature. She is currently working on two projects: one analyzing Lorraine Hansberry and Pat Parker’s literary critiques of the medical-industrial complex, and another tracing the politics of land, queer masculinity, and attachment through the film Brokeback Mountain.
Johnaé Strong is a writer, healer, and creative based in Chicago, Illinois. She has a background in education and international studies and has spent the past ten years in social movement organizing. Her work integrates political education, healing, and organizing with a focus on Black girls. Her greatest work is her children: Akeim and Jari. Johnaé is on all social media @strong_visions.
Jasmine Tabor (they/them) is a Black, queer writer from the deep south, an Undergraduate Mellon Mays Fellow at Spelman College C'21 and receiving their MFA at Syracuse University C'24. They write about healing, mourning, and the praxis of transformation; they juxtapose Black childhood and elderhood through photography and writing. Jasmine is a dreamer and, in being so, they spend a lot of time reconnecting with their childhood self through daydreams. Their ruminations consist of writing when it’s inconvenient, quiet mornings spent with the stereo turned down low, and solemn art. Works appear (or are forthcoming) in the Agnes Scott Literary Journal, Columbia University's Undergraduate Literary Criticism Journal, and Stellium Literary Magazine. They currently work as a Carolina Youth Action Project Fellow and a Saga Education Fellow, facilitating popular education, prison abolition, and algebra.
Summer-Harmony Twenish is a queer Algonquin Anishinabekwe from Kitigan Zibi (in so-called quebec, canada). They are an emerging, self-taught, multidisciplinary artist working primarily in digital art, painting, and textiles. Their work is inspired by their own Anishinabe worldviews and queer/Indigenous feminist ideas, and aims to be unapologetically vulnerable, anti-colonial, and confrontational. They have had artwork featured in places like Briarpatch Magazine’s Land Back issue and Together Apart, a zine project focusing on queer and trans Indigenous identities and relationships. They have also had artwork displayed in biskaabiiyang: returning to ourselves, a group exhibition at the All My Relations Arts gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2021. They are currently part of the N’we Jinan Emerging Artist Program, and they hope to eventually be able to blend their creative practice with their passion for community organizing, education, and youth-centered arts programming.
Verónica N. Vélez is an associate professor in secondary education and education & social justice. Her research focuses on Latinx im/migrant mother activism, community-based participatory action research in grassroots contexts, popular education, and (re)imagining cartographic tools for movement building and critical inquiry. Alongside Dr. Daniel Solorzano, she co-developed Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA), a framework and methodological approach that seeks to deepen a spatial consciousness and expand the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in critical race research in education. Her work has been published or featured in Women and GIS: Mapping Their Stories, Educational Forum, Harvard Educational Review, the High School Journal, Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, Educational Foundations, Seattle University Journal for Social Justice, Contemporary Justice Review, and Race, Ethnicity, and Education.
Alisha Walker (she/her) is an artist, advocate for criminalized survivors and sex workers, and a current member of the Support Ho(s)e Collective. As a formerly incarcerated person, she has also organized alongside formations such as Love & Protect, Survived & Punished, and Moms United Against Violence & Incarceration.
Lee Ann S. Wang is an assistant professor of Asian American studies and social welfare at UCLA. Her writing and collective practices center feminist thought and relational ways of being and knowing, with critical inquiry into the racial assemblages of gender violence, policing, and immigration law.