We forgot an important August update back in September! You can read our piece in Noname Book Club’s publication Out Of Print here. The essay, In A Pandemic, Prison Abolition Is Necessary & More Possible Than Ever, came out a little late, but is still pertinent. We hope it can provide some guidance and hopeful visions in these crucial weeks.

We’re proud to be featured this month on a panel for Advancing Leadership’s annual symposium, this year celebrating the 25th anniversary of the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The panel, Building Intersectional Movements: Disability Justice & Racial Equity, on Wednesday the 14th, will examine the intersections of disability and Black and brown freedom movements, and imagine future visions for abolition that don’t just include but unite communities of color and those with disabilities.

We’ll additionally be participating in a smattering of teaching and speaking engagements. We’ll be talking briefly to members of Building Healthy Communities in East Salinas, California on defunding police, participating in a second panel for Southern New Hampshire University on why voting is a necessary but also insufficient tool for social change, and leading an Abolition 101 workshop for students and faculty in the Occupational Therapy Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Lastly, we’re grateful to organizer Kelly Hayes for including our voice in the COVID Mixtape, part of a series of digital events for the National Week of Mourning, honoring the more than 200,000 people lost in the U.S. to the pandemic thus far. We know one of the ways fascism takes hold is by normalizing and numbing us to its own violence, by not allowing us the space we need to grieve and process the immeasurable losses we are collectively experiencing in this moment. We hope this offering can be a small piece of both healing and resistance in the face of death and indifference, and encourage you to participate in collective mourning however you can, both out of respect for those we’ve lost, but also out of respect for your own right to feel pain, knowing that you are worth more than we are currently being offered by the state.

BH