Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist and Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow, 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 censorship, healthcare, climate, and how they affect systems-affected people. 

Her writings have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Solitary Watch, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, The Marshall Project, Scalawag, Prism, The Appeal, Teen Vogue, among others. She writes on Substack at Write or Die. 

Harris authored a segment on This American Life and was interviewed for a documentary by Al Jazeera about solitary confinement, in which she was detained for 8.5 of her 17 years incarcerated. She co-authored a book—Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement—that will be released by Pluto Press in September 2025. Now she is working on a book about the teenagers from juvenile who were her neighbors in adult solitary confinement. 

All photos courtesy of Ariana Gomez