Closing Keynote — Mariame Kaba in conversation with Lewis Raven Wallace
Thursday, June 12, 2025 | 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm EST
This session will not be recored.
Mariame Kaba (she/her) co-founded and co-leads with Andrea Ritchie, the initiative, Interrupting Criminalization, a movement resource hub offering research, connection, learning, and practice for organizers, practitioners, and advocates on the cutting edge of efforts to build a world free of violence, surveillance, policing, and punishment. She is an educator, organizer, and librarian/archivist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice.
Mariame has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including Project NIA, We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander (now Love & Protect), Just Practice Collaborative, Survived & Punished, and most recently For the People Lefitist Library Project.
Kaba’s writing has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, Essence, the New Inquiry, and more. She 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), No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie (The New Press, August 2022), Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes (Haymarket, May 2023), Lifting As They Climbed: Mapping A History of Trailblazing Black Women in Chicago with Essence McDowell (Haymarket, August 2023) and most recently Prisons Must Fall (Haymarket, April 2025).
Lewis Wallace—Lewis Raven Wallace (they/ze/he) is an independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina. He’s the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast.
He currently holds a position as the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, where he works to bridge the gap between journalistic and abolitionist praxis and build community among journalists who oppose policing and incarceration. His new book Radical Unlearning is forthcoming from Beacon Press.
After many years as a barista and crusty punk, Lewis began his journalism career as a 2012 Pritzker Journalism Fellow at Chicago Public Media and spent five years covering economics and the environment for local and national outlets before becoming a freelancer. His journalism has won many awards and his work at the intersection of journalism and social movements has been recognized with a Ford Global Fellowship, a Harvard Knight Nieman Visiting Journalism Fellowship, a Camargo Fellowship, and an AIR New Voices Fellowship among others. He currently serves as an advisor to Shift Press Houston and The Objective.
In addition to his work as a journalist, Lewis is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation, and a cofounder of many organizations and projects including Riot Youth at Ann Arbor’s Neutral Zone, the Chicago Childcare Collective, the Transformative Justice Law Project, Black and Pink Southwest Ohio, and Press On, a southern movement media collective where he was the director of popular education. He is white and transgender, and was born and raised in the Midwest with deep roots in the South. When he’s not working, he plays the accordion, writes poetry, and spends time with his dog Frankie and his pig, Dogwood.