I have been I have been a part of the US and global movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for nearly three decades. I first learned the movement-building arts of power analysis, strategic communications, base building, and leadership development in the fight for global access to generic HIV medications led by South African anti-apartheid activists and the fight for imprisoned people living with HIV in the US. Since 2008, my primary organizing home has been the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective, Women With A Vision (WWAV).

All of my organizing work has challenged the intersections of HIV and mass criminalization by doing. By being with the people. By staying in the work. To say this is more than a simple nod to the core tenets of community organizing. Whatever stories we tell about the intents of the criminal legal system, mass criminalization as we know it today has been built through the disassemblage of entire communities. We learned how to decarcerate our communities by literally reassembling them. Through relationships of solidarity that were built in care, we worked to transform the social conditions for which prisons have been posited as the solution and, in so doing, to create together prison-free futures in real time.

I recorded some reflections from my early HIV prison activist work in Philadelphia alongside my beloved mentor, John Horace Bell, in the zine “Why Are You Here?: Challenging the Prison System, Challenging Ourselves” and have expanded on the histories I was part of making in the article “Our Relationships Carry The Movement,” which was published in the Radical History Review special issue, “The AIDS Crisis is not Over.” For more on my now seventeen year relationship with the WWAV collective, please click over to the Fire Dreams tab and our Born in Flames Living Archive.