All-HAL Convening

Zaira was born and raised in the Puerto Rican archipelago. She came across oral histories when she was interviewed in 2017 after Hurricane María left her without a home. Since then, Zaira has been curriculum designer for the oral history book where her story is featured, served as community liaison in oral history projects in central Puerto Rico, and is currently the Community Programs Manager for Oral History, Education, and Social Justice at the OHL.

Sherri Arguello is a Denver resident with warmth, perspective, and a grounded curiosity about people and place. She values authentic connection, thoughtful conversation, and everyday moments that hold meaning. Whether exploring nearby neighborhoods, staying close to loved ones, or engaging online with care and clarity, she brings steady presence and open-hearted practicality. A lifelong learner, she blends quiet optimism, resilience, and a deep appreciation for community, history, and small joys that endure over time together.

Dr. Omar Bah is the Founder and Executive Director of the Refugee Dream Center and an adjunct professor of clinical psychology at William James College. A former journalist and refugee, he is a nationally recognized advocate for refugees and immigrants, drawing from lived experience to advance community empowerment, mental health, and social justice. He also serves as faculty with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma at Harvard Medical School.

Davarian L. Baldwin is the author of several books, most recently In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities. He serves as a co-PI on the HAL-affiliated Renewal Project and was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his work in racial and economic justice.

Dr. Rachelle Berry’s work spans Black Geographies, Black Feminist Theory, and Urban Geography. Their research examines how universities produce anti-Black urbanism through campus expansion and the displacement of Black communities. Drawing on archival research, oral history, and scholar-organizing, Berry studies memory, reparational justice, and redress. Their current book, What Remains: A Geography of Rememory, examines Black community responses to university-dispossession in Athens, Georgia.

Barbara Berumen is the Project Coordinator for the Global HSI Equity Innovation Hub Climate Action Leadership Pathways Project (CALPP) grant at California State University, Northridge. She works closely with Padres Pioneros leaders, a local community organization, and non-profit Urban Visionaries, to plan and implement community programming. Barbara received a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is passionate about merging her environmental studies knowledge with community organizing. Barbara is part of our Climates of Inequality Project.

Maurice “Trix” Blackwell is a community organizer, storyteller, and advocate based in Connecticut. He serves as Director of Community Outreach for the Justice for Everybody Movement at Yale, where he builds connections between incarcerated people, community members, and partners working toward justice reform. He also helps lead Liberation Live!, a platform that brings incarcerated voices into public conversations through writing, media, and Storytelling. A graduate of the Yale Prison Education Initiative and a current student at the University of New Haven, Maurice draws on his lived experience and education to advance civic engagement, expand access to opportunity, and ensure that people most affected by incarceration help shape the work.

Jill Betz Bloom, Ph.D. has written and presented widely at national and international conferences on global mental health, refugee social-emotional wellbeing, psychology and climate change, environmental injustice, global gender violence, transnational feminism, gender and sexual identity, and prejudice and racism.

Callum Carr-Marquis is the head archivist at the University of Michigan – Flint Genesee Historical Collections Center. They have lived and worked in Flint for the past eight years. Their research interests include archives as a locus for community trauma and community memory. They have worked on urban renewal since arriving in Flint and have assisted the St. Johns Memorial Committee directly for the last three years. 

Michael H. Carriere is a professor of history at the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), where he serves as director of the MSOE Honors Program. He is also on the steering committee of the McNeely Prison Education Consortium (MPEC), a collection of universities offering for-credit college courses in detention facilities throughout southeastern Wisconsin. His work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Planning History, Cultural History, Reviews in American History, Pitchfork.com, and Salon.com. He is the co-author, with David Schalliol, of The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America (The University of Chicago Press, 2021). He holds a Ph.D. in American history from The University of Chicago.

Bethany Collins is the City of Flint’s Liaison for the St. John Street Project. As ARPA Grants Administrator, she manages Flint’s $90 million American Rescue Plan portfolio, working with city departments and community organizations. She has spent  15 years in community investment and neighborhood revitalization, helping Flint residents tell their neighborhoods’ stories. She holds a BBA from the University of Michigan and an MBA, and is Vice President for the Detroit Chapter of the National Black MBA Association.  

Conor is a master’s student in the Public History track of the HSPH program at the University of Minnesota. Informed by his background in Geography, GIS, the arts, and community organizing, Conor works across disciplines to critically reimagine who fashions the past and why. Conor currently holds a graduate assistantship (Law & HSPH) as a researcher and co-instructor working with Metro State’s Transformation and Reentry Through Education and Community Program (TREC). In this role, Conor conducts archival research, supports collaborative research projects led by scholars inside, and explores ethical questions surrounding research in prisons. 

Monica X. Delgado is an LA-based educator, community organizer and cultural practitioner. Born to a Puerto Rican mother and Bolivian father, she spent most of her formative years between Santa Fe, NM and Santa Cruz, CA. She gained experience as a community organizer and musician while studying at UNM. Today she serves as the Coordinator for the Social Justice Center at El Camino College in Torrance, CA where she has worked under Student Equity & Achievement since 2016.

Akisha Townsend Eaton is an attorney, community advocate, and Emmy-winning storyteller who lives in Bowling Green, KY.  She is a descendant of Jonesville, a tight-knit African American community dating back to the 1880s until it was demolished by the expansion of Western Kentucky University.  She is also a member of the Western Kentucky University Jonesville Reconciliation Workgroup and co-founder of the Jonesville Descendant Resource Group. 

Nancy Giunta lives in Western Maryland where she directs the Social Work Program at Frostburg State University (FSU). Her interests include community development, food security, and aging. She was introduced to The Brownsville Project in 2020 and has collaborated with its directors Clory Jackson and Caroline Hann since 2023 when she joined the faculty at FSU after 15 years at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the modern United States. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America (Yale University Press, 2024) and co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (University of Wyoming Press, 2024). She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver where she teaches U.S. gender, business, and public history. The NEH and the Mellon Foundation have supported her projects on the history of displacement and community resistance on the Auraria campus in Denver. Her collaborative work includes walking tours, digital history projects, and museum exhibits.

Maria Guerrero, born in Cerritos, San Luis Potosí, Mexico, has lived in California for 34 years. Married to Arturo for 29 years, she is a proud mother of two. For 25 years, Maria has served Padres Pioneros, beginning as a volunteer and growing into her role as President. Through leadership, education, and community engagement, she is dedicated to promoting equality, inclusion, empowerment, and positive change while uplifting and strengthening families throughout her community.

A current MA student at CU Denver studying Cultural and Intellectual History, Britt Henslee has been involved in the Auraria Public History Project as a research assistant and editor for a large portion of her graduate career. Outside of her work with the forthcoming Renewing Auraria book and the Come Together: Community in the Old Auraria Neighborhood exhibit, Britt also teaches Core Composition I and II at CU Denver and serves as president of the university’s history honors society, Phi Alpha Theta. Britt believes in the importance of community-centered historical inquiry, and the Auraria Project has offered her a home to act on that belief.

Sophia Imperioli is a public historian and Visitor Experience & Volunteer Coordinator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. She holds an M.A. in Public History and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Colorado Denver. Her work spans museum operations, exhibition development, archival and oral history research, historical interpretation, and documentary production. 

Elizabeth (Beth) Koenig, JD has a background in speech communication, music, law and public administration. She has worked extensively in the areas of higher education, government relations, conflict resolution, organizational operations and coaching/mentoring. Her experience spans academic, community, and executive settings, where she has served as a teacher, advisor, administrator, and co-creator of innovative programs and centers. Beth is deeply committed to expanding meaningful learning and growth opportunities in the carceral space and beyond.

Eboné M. Lockett, award-winning educational leader and humanitarian, champions sustainable, community-driven change through a holistic approach to research, learning, and development. As Founder/CEO of Harvesting Humanity LLC and 5 year Board Chair of Rosa Parks Farmers Market, she innovates and leads COMMUNIVERSITY experiences that position people, policy, and place-based solutions.

I am the middle child of six siblings and father to two beautiful kids. I consider myself to be a First-Generation Tagger-Chicano that was raised in Watts and South Central. Prior to working at El Camino, I did community-based work doing gang prevention and intervention work for nearly 10 years. I am passionate about utilizing different elements of Hip-Hop and Indigenous based practices to foster resiliency and promote healing in marginalized black and brown communities. With this, I have been fortunate to co-found South Central Arts, a grassroots network that seeks to elevate the work of local entrepreneurs, local artists, and cultural producers in South Central Los Angeles Since 2017. I earned my bachelor’s degree from California State University Dominguez Hills and my master’s degree from California State University Northridge. Both of my degrees are in Chicanx Studies. My thesis centers on Graffiti Muralism. Title: “The Barrio Beautification Effect: “Utilizing Graffiti as A Tool to Build Resilience, Resistance, and Healing with Adolescent Boys and Young Men of Color in Los Angeles. A graffiti-based mural program designed to uplift adolescent Latino boys and other young men of color who have experienced economic hardships, violence, and systemic marginalization in low-income communities. Growing up, I always hoped for mentorship opportunities. I utilized graffiti as an outlet to express myself and to build a community with people that I went to school with. Although I got into some trouble, graffiti meant a lot to me. I have utilized my aspirations and cultural practices that I learned growing up and applied it to my professional work.

Mayra López-Humphreys’s research centers the knowledge and lived experiences of justice impacted communities, with a particular focus on higher education, reentry, belonging, and healing. Her work examines how institutions can move beyond deficit based approaches to recognize community strengths, collective care, and education as pathways toward individual and community well-being.

Clory is a creative artist-activist blending live performance, social discourse, and grassroots organizing to help communities disrupt patterns of hate and systemic oppression. She founded The Brownsville Project in 2018, inspired by her journey tracing her father’s family history as Black Americans in Appalachia and her maternal grandmother’s legacy as a Civil Rights activist in Chicago. Clory is deeply committed to lifelong learning, currently exploring spiritual healing and liberation practices that inform her work.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from Spelman College, an MFA in Acting from Penn State University, and studied musical theatre at Shenandoah Conservatory. After performing regionally and working in New York’s tech start-up scene, Clory merged her business knowledge with her family’s civil rights legacy and her passion for storytelling to create The Brownsville Project.

Ross Stanton Jordan is a curator interested in the confluence of politics, history, and visual culture. He is the curator at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago’s dynamic monument to democracy. At the museum and independently, Ross has produced dozens of exhibitions and over one hundred public programs that connect the social justice issues of the past to the present-day demands for social equity via collaborations with artists, scholars, and community-based organizations. Significant curated projects include: Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive (2021), featuring MacArthur Fellow Guillermo Gómez-Peña in residency at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt at Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in 2024, and Loyola University Art Museum in 2025. Ross has held curatorial fellowships at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Independent Curators International, and the American Association of Museums. In 2022, Newcity Magazine named Ross one of the top 50 Chicago arts administrators working to make a more equitable and sustainable arts world. In 2024, The Chicago Tribune named Ross, along with his colleagues at Hull-House, Chicagoans of the Year in Museums. Jordan holds a studio arts degree from Connecticut College and dual master’s degrees in art history and arts administration and policy from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alison Lefkovitz is the author of Strange Bedfellows: Marriage in the Age of Women’s Liberation (Penn Press, 2018). She has also published in the Law & History Review, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, the Newark Star-Ledger, the Washington Post, and TIME magazine.

Martin Leyva is a formerly incarcerated Chicano scholar, and full-time professor of Sociology at El Camino College in Los Angeles. He has a strong passion for social justice and human rights issues. He has spoken and shared at multiple venues including universities throughout California and the American Society of Criminology. He has led trainings on Best Practices for Working with Formerly Incarcerated Individuals, Emotional Intelligence, and Spiritual Self Care & Healing. He is well known for his abilities with gang intervention/prevention & mediation skills and helping those with drug and alcohol issues.

Neil M. Maher’s books include Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard, 2017) and Nature’s New Deal (Oxford, 2008), and his writing has also appeared in popular media such as New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yes magazine.  In 2026 he was awarded a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship to continue his work on an environmental justice history of Newark, New Jersey.

Albert Medina’s work is rooted in lived experience. After navigating the justice system himself as a young person, he found purpose in supporting others walking similar paths. His commitment to helping the system‑impacted communities began in 2016, when he started tutoring and interpreting for incarcerated adults while he himself was incarcerated. That experience became the foundation for the mentoring, advocacy, and youth work he continues today. Albert has been part of Self Awareness and Recovery (SAR) since February 2024, mentoring re-entry–impacted youth and facilitating trauma‑informed programming inside Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. His work with SAR builds on years of experience in case management, curriculum development, and systems navigation across Los Padrinos, Da Vinci Rise High School, and First Place for Youth. A former Project Rebound student, Albert blends academic training with the insight that comes from lived experience. He earned an Associate’s Degree in Behavioral Science from El Camino College and a Bachelor’s Degree in Human Services from California State University Fullerton. Today, he continues that journey as a dual MSW/MPA student at California State University San Bernardino, committed to shaping programs and policies that honor the resilience of system‑impacted communities. 

Bahiyyah M. Muhammad, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology at Howard University (HU) in the District of Columbia (DC). Dr. Muhammad is also Founding Director for the Higher Education in Prison (HEP) Programming across all three campuses at the university and the HU Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel. To date, Professor Muhammad has spearheaded HEP courses and innovative programs offered through Howard University’s Schools of Law, Divinity, Communications, Fine Arts and the College of Arts and Sciences. These graduate seminars and undergraduate classes have occurred in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the DC Department of Corrections (DCDOC), the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) and the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) detention facilities in Maryland and Washington, DC. To date, approximately one thousand howard students, alumni, faculty, incarcerated, and formerly incarcerated individuals have participated in classes inside prisons, jails and detention facilities in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Under Dr. Muhammad’s leadership, Howard University became the first HBCU to offer award winning post-secondary education to incarcerated females, males, detained juveniles and their families, simultaneously.

Most recently, Dr. Muhammad was selected as a 2020-2021 Mandela Washington Reciprocal Exchange Fellow for the U.S. Government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) and the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX). Through this fellowship, Dr. Muhammad will spend the year working with an African Leadership Fellow to expand prisoner and juvenile refugee programming in the Kingdom of ESwatini (known as Swaziland), located in Southern Africa. Specifically, Dr. Muhammad will travel to Swaziland to provide face-to-face expert consultation at Mawelawela Correctional Centre and Mpaka Refugee Camp for STEM classes and empowerment programming for detained female youth. In 2017, Dr. Muhammad served as a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. In this position, she reviewed the U.S. policy on human rights for children and helps to design new approaches to assist the U.S. government in addressing the issue. Dr. Muhammad served within the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs. Furthermore, Dr. Muhammad has been the recipient of various service awards for her engagement with correctional facilities. Most recently, she was a Featured Honoree for Voices for A Second Chance-50the Anniversary Gala and was award the Carolyn Cross Community Impact Award for her groundbreaking work with the DC Department of Corrections.

In addition, in 2018, Dr. Muhammad was awarded with the George Strawn Volunteer Award for her innovative programming and college courses offered to scholars in the DC Jail’s Correctional Treatment and Detention Facilities. Dr. Muhammad’s prison services were also awarded by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2016. She was recognized as Volunteer of the Year for her MOM Camp program that allowed children of incarcerated parents to “sleepover” at a federal prison camp with their incarcerated mothers who completed her college course, “Special Topics: Children of Incarcerated Parents”. In 2015, she received a Human Rights Award from the New Jersey Education Association, which was an advocacy award for her service to school-aged children affected by parental incarceration. This work was highlighted through the Newark Public Schools Superintendent in 2018, in the VICE of HBO Segment with Michael K. Williams, entitled “Raised in the System”, which she worked with Newark Elementary Students of the incarcerated. This film highlights success and resilience among those affected by mass incarceration and is aligned with Dr. Muhammad’s recent TED talk on this topic.

For more than a decade, Dr. Muhammad has been conducting groundbreaking research on the children of incarcerated parents and the consequences of parental incarceration on children. Dr. Muhammad has done hundreds of interviews with affected children and parents in the United States, Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. She has published research on the impact of parental incarceration – from witnessing a parent’s arrest by police to the physical and emotional separation resulting from actual incarceration – on children, their parents, and familial bonds, as well as children’s success stories. Dr. Muhammad is co-founder of Project Iron Kids, an initiative to educate and empower children of incarcerated parents. She co-published the first coloring book for children of the incarcerated, titled The Prison Alphabet: An Educational Coloring Book for Children of the Incarcerated. Her work has been translated in Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and French. In addition, Dr. Muhammad is the author of two criminal justice textbooks, has a co-authored book Credible Messenger Mentors in D.C. in production with Temple University Press. Her most recent co-edited anthology, “Social Revolution: Black Children of Incarcerated Parents Speak Truth to Power” (Routledge Press), challenges the field to explore the positive experiences among children affected by parental incarceration. She has also co-edited “Mothering From The Field” (Rutgers University Press), that explores motherhood at the intersection of field research. Her scholarship has been published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Social Problems, the Peabody Journal of Education, Journal of Criminal Justice and Law Review, the Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, the Mother Studies Journal, and the American University Business and Law Review.

Dr. Muhammad has served as an invited speaker inside prisons, jails and detention centers around the world. Her research, innovative programming, study abroad enrichment sessions and college courses have exposes students to global issues of imprisonment in Africa, Asia, Europe, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America. Dr. Muhammad is an innovative educator that utilizes a radical pedagogy to engage students in an intellectual journey that is described as, “empowering”, “transformative”, “critical” and “freeing”. Her classes have been dubbed the “Dr. Muhammad Experience” and have won her the title of Professor of the Year 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019. In addition, Dr. Muhammad voluntarily lived in a cell for a weekend (January 15-17, 2016) to gain a more holistic understanding of life behind prison walls. Dr. Muhammad is a unique educator working strategically to change the landscape of higher education, as it is known today. Dr. Muhammad was recently nominated for the very prestigious Global Teachers Prize for her groundbreaking instruction. Professor Muhammad’s newest revolutionary course, the only of its kind in the world, Policing Inside Out initiated through a partnership with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, brings together law enforcement officers and black millennials to engage in brutally honest dialogue, trust building excursions and critical readings on minority community-police relations. Now offered at Morgan State University and Coppin State

University, Policing Inside Out has transformed the ways in which inter-departmental law enforcement agencies police in Black communities. Prior to Dr. Muhammad’s academic tenure, she served as Director of the College Bound Consortium (CBC), a HEP program founded in 2010 to educate incarcerated persons in New Jersey. The CBC was facilitated at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCF) in Clinton, NJ through a partnership between Drew University, Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) and the Drew Theological School’s Partnership for Religion and Education in Prison (PREP). During this time, Professor Muhammad taught classes at EMCF and Northern State Prison (NSP) and arranged for faculty across both campuses to teach a variety of courses to approximately 200 incarcerated women in New Jersey.

Dr. Bahiyyah M. Muhammad received her B.A. in Administration of Justice with a minor in Psychology and a Criminology Certificate from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. She received her M.A. in Corrections Administration from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice with a specialization on children of incarcerated parents was received from Rutgers University, School of Criminal Justice in Newark, New Jersey. Professor Muhammad has taught courses at The New School-Urban Studies Department, West Chester University-Department of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University-School of Criminal Justice and currently serves as a tenured faculty member at the Howard University.

Kevin P. Murphy’s work focuses on community-engaged history, public history, urban history, and the history of gender and sexuality. A former member of the Humanities Action Lab steering committee, he has participated in its projects since its inception.

Dimitri Nesbitt is an urban designer and planner whose work examines how planning and design contribute to spatial injustice, environmental inequality, and access barriers to cities—and how they can instead support community resilience and repair. At the Collective for Racial & Disability Justice at UCLA Law, he contributes to research, publications, and program development connecting design, culture, and justice. His work with the University of Illinois Chicago explores community memory, displacement, and reparative planning.

My name is Lara Nkume, I’m the Treasurer for the St. John Street Historical Committee.  I’m a retired Special Education Teacher from the Flint community Schools.  I spend most of my time keeping records, overseeing the progress of our historical sight.  Also, I help with fund raising by collecting donations, collecting pictures and stories for our “MEMORIES “ Calendar so as to preserve our history for our community.

Leeann “Parker” Parker is the Operations Manager at Exchange for Change and an alumna of the organization’s educational programming. After nearly two decades of incarceration, she returned home committed to advocating for education, second chances, and opportunities for people impacted by the justice system. Parker earned a certificate in Addiction Studies and is continuing her education at Miami Dade College. Drawing from both her lived and professional experience, she is passionate about supporting returning citizens and using her story to inspire change.

Michaela Pommells has more than two decades of experience as an organizer working on issues related to social justice from an intersectional and multi-issue perspective. She has worked at the grassroots, national and international levels to engage and support directly impacted communities in using liberatory mechanisms to advance justice. Her work includes political education development and racial identity development, and she has facilitated capacity-building workshops geared toward gender and racial justice. Michaela is the former Campaign Director for Care, Not Control, a campaign to end youth incarceration in Pennsylvania and is a co-founder of the Coalition for Racial Justice, a consulting collaborative organized to eliminate race-based disparities in Philadelphia and beyond.  She is now Executive Director of Youth First Justice Collaborative.

Sequan Prude is the Director of the Impact Justice Center (IJC) at Hunter College, where he leads efforts to expand access to higher education and support for justice-impacted students. His approach is grounded in the credible messenger tradition and years spent working directly in reentry education and program leadership, experience that gives him a deep understanding of the barriers reentry communities face. That understanding shapes how IJC builds its programs: with a commitment to creating pathways shaped by people who have lived that experience. Sequan holds a Bachelor of Science in Behavioral Science from Mercy University and remains closely connected to the network that shaped his own path into this work.

Melissa Radcliff has been with Our Children’s Place of Coastal Horizons in North Carolina since February 2007 and has presented extensively at the local, state, and national level to professionals who support children. She has considerable experience working with correctional facilities and community organizations to support children whose parents are incarcerated or being released. She is currently overseeing the FRESH (Family Re-Entry Support and Help) program as well as Parent Day in seven prisons.

Kimberly Rodgers (she/her) is a multipassionate independent consultant specializing in organizational strategy, facilitation, community building, and storytelling. With over 15 years of cross-sector experience, her eclectic skillset aligns people, ideas, and action to cultivate the conditions for an equitable future. As a wayfinder and bridgebuilder for collective liberation, her purpose in this life is creating individual and collective pathways to more interdependent ways of thinking, being, and relating. 

Arijit Sen is an architectural historian who explores how everyday places and ordinary people shape cities. His work brings attention to cultural landscapes and community voices often left out of official histories.  Since 2012, he has led the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School and has worked with communities on public history and preservation projects across North America. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2022. In 2023, he co-founded Community Powered, a statewide public humanities project in Wisconsin.

Dr. Shannon has broad interests are in urban development and inequality, geographic information systems, political geography, and place effects on health. His research focuses on the role of maps and spatial analysis in shaping our understanding of hunger, housing, poverty, and neighborhood development. He is also interested in the role of participatory research methods in mobilizing community action around these issues.

Tina Shull (she/her) is an Associate Professor of History at UNC Charlotte specializing in race, empire, borders and immigration enforcement, and climate migration in the modern US and the World. She is the author of Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance (UNC Press, 2022), creator of digital history projects IMM Print, Climate Refugee Stories, and Climate CLT, and co-curates Climates of Inequality: Charlotte with the Humanities Action Lab.

Autumn Talley is passionate about ending carceral systems and addressing their harms. She has been the Director of Care, Not Control since 2024, coming with experience as a Social Worker in settings including a family shelter and different behavioral health clinics. She was also involved in Pennsylvania’s first graduate worker strike, which won better wages and conditions for all Temple University graduate workers. Autumn is an academic researcher focusing on community-led systems of care and the impact of incarceration on social relationships. She uses her direct practice skills, academic and firsthand knowledge, and organizing experience to grow Care, Not Control’s power and win liberation for Pennsylvania’s youth. She also enjoys reading fiction, traveling with her family, and listening to Gracie’s Corner with her toddler.

Hattie Thomas Whitehead is a lifelong community activist and results-driven leader from Athens, Georgia. She became an activist at age 14 through the desegregation movement and was jailed for her participation. After 27 years in corporate management, she founded the Athens StepUp Scholarship Program, awarding more than 100 scholarships to local students. A first descendant of Linnentown, she helped secure historic recognition and redress efforts, authored Giving Voice to Linnentown, and wrote Linnentown: The Musical. Hattie serves as president of the Center for Racial Justice and Black Futures, scheduled to open this December.

Dr. Carolina Villalba regularly designs writing courses centering community engagement and collaboration. As a course facilitator for the South Florida organization Exchange for Change, Dr. Villalba also teaches writing and literature courses to women at Homestead Correctional Institution (HCI). She was Senior Editor for the “Narratives of Incarceration” Special Issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and a contributing partner to the original States of Incarceration project.

Dr. Breea C. Willingham earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University at Buffalo and brings over two decades of experience in teaching, research, and academic leadership. Before entering academia, Dr. Willingham spent ten years as a newspaper reporter covering crime, murder trials, and education in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Upstate New York. Her research is deeply informed by her personal experience as the sister and aunt of two men serving life sentences, and by a broader commitment to confronting racial and gendered injustice. Dr. Willingham’s scholarship centers mass incarceration’s impact on Black families and the role of trauma in shaping Black women’s experiences within the criminal legal system. Her work on incarcerated fathers and their children, Black women’s prison narratives, teaching in women’s prisons, and police violence against Black women has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.

Dr. Willingham has presented her research at academic conferences across the United States and internationally, and has delivered lectures at universities in the U.S. and the U.K. She has also facilitated writing and reentry workshops in both women’s and men’s prisons, and regularly shares her expertise on race, gender, crime, and higher education in prison through webinars,
panels, and podcasts.

She served as the inaugural Managing Editor of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison, the first scholarly journal dedicated to publishing research on prison education. She is also the editor of Punishment and Society, an anthology she curated for educators teaching about the broader societal ramifications of incarceration.

Dr. Willingham is currently completing two book projects: Black Feminist Disappearance Theory: A Critical Framework for Confronting the Erasure of Black Women and Girls, under contract with Routledge.