Biography
Kwaneta Harris (she/her) is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist, from Detroit. In her writing she illuminates how the experience of being incarcerated in the largest state prison in Texas is vastly different for women in ways that directly map onto a culture rooted in misogyny. Her stories expose how the intersection of gender, race, and place contribute to state-sanctioned, gender-based violence.
Harris is an abolition feminist and through her writing she offers a peek inside the brutal criminal legal system, with hope to reimagine effective non-carceral solutions for those who harm. She writes about abortion, censorship, and climate change and how they affect systems-impacted people.
Her writings have appeared in PEN America, Truthout, Lux magazine, Prism, Appeal, Slate, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. She was interviewed for a documentary by Al Jazeera about solitary confinement, in which she has been detained the last eight of her seventeen years incarcerated. She is currently working on a book about the youth from juvenile who are her neighbors in solitary confinement.
