The Reformatory

Melanie A. Marotta is a lecturer in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University (Baltimore, Maryland). Marotta’s research focuses on American literature (in particular African American), young adult literature, the American West, science fiction, and ecocriticism. Her book African American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative, was published by the University Press of Mississippi as part of the Children’s Literature Association series (March 2023). Marotta is originally from Ontario, Canada.

Melanie A. Marotta

The Ghost of America’s Past Haunts Its Present: On Tananarive Due’s “The Reformatory”

Decolonize | Defund | Abolish

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it." — Frank Herbert

Nicholas Shapiro is an assistant professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. He directs Carceral Ecologies, a multidisciplinary research group that studies the intersection of environmental issues and policing.

Nicholas Shapiro

Kate McInerny is a staff researcher with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA, where she recently earned her BA in public affairs. She also works as a digital historian for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Kate McInerny

Matyos Kidane is a community organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community-based abolitionist group working to dismantle the police surveillance state. He is a 2023 MediaJustice Network Fellow and a 2023 John W. Mack Movement Fellow.

Matyos Kidane

Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco is a statistician and data scientist working with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA. He received his statistical education at UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz, where he worked in various research groups, and outside of his prior academic institutions, he worked as a data scientist in San Francisco.

Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco

State Eyes in the Sky: On the History of Helicopters in Policing

LARB Lit

"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein

Science &amp; Technology

Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing

Grégory Pierrot is an associate professor in English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, where he teaches American and African American literature. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (2019) and Decolonize Hipsters (2021). He is co-editor, with Marlene Daut and Marion Rohrleitner, of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (2022).

Grégory Pierrot

Beyond the Cosmetic: A Conversation with Esther Armah

Isabel Ruehl is an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Isabel Ruehl

To Speak Upon the Ashes: On Peter Sacks’s “Resistance”

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa

Art &amp; Architecture

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, academic, and co-founder of the <a href="https://radicalbookscollective.com/">Radical Books Collective</a>. She is the author of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Cold-War-Assemblages-Decolonization-to-Digital/Shringarpure/p/book/9780367670900">Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital</a> and also the editor of a short-books series for OR Books titled <a href="https://www.orbooks.com/decolonize-that/">Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas.</a>

Bhakti Shringarpure

Decolonizing History and Its Telling: A Conversation with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Decolonize | Defund | Abolish

The Ghost of America’s Past Haunts Its Present: On Tananarive Due’s “The Reformatory”

State Eyes in the Sky: On the History of Helicopters in Policing

Beyond the Cosmetic: A Conversation with Esther Armah

To Speak Upon the Ashes: On Peter Sacks’s “Resistance”

Decolonizing History and Its Telling: A Conversation with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Decolonize the Family: A Conversation with Amandine Gay

An Indigenous Elsewhere: A Conversation with Sandy Grande

“Remembering Is an Act of Protest”: A Conversation with Monique Kwachou

What We Do to Define Ourselves: A Conversation with Zaka Toto

“We Need Wholesale Decolonization”: A Conversation with Grieve Chelwa

A Demanding Relationship with History: A Conversation with Priyamvada Gopal

Facing France’s Ghosts: A Conversation with Mame-Fatou Niang

What Is Our Resistance?: A Conversation with Joy Mboya

Decolonizing Education: A Conversation with Linda Tuhiwai Smith