Elizabeth Alexander – decorated poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate – is president of Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education. Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. She is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, and co-designed the Art for Justice Fund. Notably, Dr. Alexander composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama, and is author or co-author of fifteen books. Her book of poems, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006, and her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 2015. Her latest book, released in 2022, is The Trayvon Generation.

For more information, please visit mellon.org or on Twitter @ProfessorEA.

Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator—both at the university level and in the larger public sphere—has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of eleven books, including Abolition.Feminism.Now, co-authored with Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, and a new edition of her Autobiography. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without carceral systems and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.
 
For more information, please visit UCSC's website here.

Gina Dent (Ph.D., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is humanities associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion and associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She previously held positions at Princeton University and Columbia University and was director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research at UCSC, as well as principal investigator (PI) for the University of California Multicampus Research Group on Transnationalizing Justice. Currently, she serves as PI and co-director for Visualizing Abolition,  funded by the Mellon Foundation. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture ([1993] New York: The New Press, 1998) and author of articles on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art. Her recent projects grow out of her work as an advocate for prison abolition: Abolition. Feminism. Now. (co-authored with Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, Haymarket 2022), and the in-progress works Visualizing Abolition (co-edited with Rachel Nelson) and Prison as a Border, on popular culture and the conditions of knowledge.

For more information, please visit visualizingabolition.ucsc.edu.

Mitchell Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years , won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family , was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on This American Life, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire , as well as in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harpers, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University.

For more information, please visit mitchellsjackson.com or on Twitter @MitchSJackson.

Jesse Krimes is an artist whose work explores societal mechanisms of power and control with a focus on criminal and racial justice. While serving a six-year prison sentence, he produced and smuggled out numerous bodies of work, established prison art programs, and co-created artist collectives. After his release, he co-founded Right of Return USA, the first national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists. He also successfully led a class-action lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase for charging formerly incarcerated people predatory fees after their release from federal prison. Krimes’ work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Palais de Tokyo, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the International Red Cross Museum. He was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Pew Center, Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, and Art for Justice Fund. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Kadist Foundation, Bunker Artspace, and the Agnes Gund Collection.

For more information, please visit jessekrimes.com, rightofreturnusa.com or on Twitter @jesse_krimes and @RightofReturnUS.