Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist and Movements Against Mass Incarceration Social Change Fellow. 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, and Teen Vogue, among others. She writes on Substack at Write or Die. In 2025, Harris was recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and Prison Journalism Project at the annual Stillwater Awards as the Prison Journalist of the Year.

Harris was an inaugural 2024 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow. She 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 eighteen years incarcerated. Additionally, Harris co-authored the book Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement. 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