Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame co-leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018.
Kaba is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Press 2021), Missing Daddy (Haymarket 2019), Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Faciltators with Shira Hassan (Project NIA, 2019), See You Soon (Haymarket, March 2022) and No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie (The New Press, Aug 2022).
Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator, and photographer. She is also the host of Truthout’s podcast Movement Memos. Hayes is a cofounder of the Lifted Voices collective and the Chicago Light Brigade. Her written work is featured in numerous publications and multiple anthologies, including Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books, 2016), Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square (Routledge, 2020), and The Solidarity Struggle: How People of Color Succeed and Fail at Showing Up for Each Other in the Fight for Freedom (BGD Press, 2016). Hayes also coauthored an essay with Mariame Kaba in Kaba’s book We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021). Hayes’s movement photography is featured in the Freedom and Resistance exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History.
Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and board president at Truthout. She is the co-author (with Victoria Law) of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms and the author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. Schenwar has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, among others. Schenwar is a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and organizes with the Love & Protect collective. She lives in Chicago with her partner, child, and abolitionist cat.
Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and co-host and producer of the Beyond Prisons podcast. Dr. Wilson is one of the recipients of the 2023 Leeway Transformation Award for her commitment to the use of art for social change. Her work has appeared in Mariame Kaba’s
We Do This ‘til We Free Us (2021),
Making Abolitionist Worlds: Proposals for a World on Fire (2020), and
Abolishing Carceral Society (2018), and in outlets including
TruthOut and
Shadowproof.