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kwanetaharris.bsky.social
Kwaneta Harris
@kwanetaharris.bsky.social
2.4K followers 76 following 58 posts
Incarcerated Journalist, Writer, and Activist. Exposing the abuses and conditions suffered by incarcerated women daily. Account managed by assistant.

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Kwaneta Harris @kwanetaharris.bsky.social · Dec 6
Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner and expat, now incarcerated journalist and a @haymarketbooks.org Writing Freedom Fellow. Her powerful and shocking stories expose how the intersection of gender, race and place contribute to state-sanctioned, gender-based violence.

kwanetaharris.com
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
Thank you for sharing this critically important work and the demands therein!
ninosindex.bsky.social Abolition Strategies: police, bail, cages, borders @ninosindex.bsky.social · 19d
"What We Demand
We call on our communities to recognize that abolition is not only about tearing down cages but also about building worlds expansive enough to hold our transitions, our elders and our descendants. We name the Menopausal Multiverse as an abolitionist cartography…"
kwanetaharris.bsky.social Kwaneta Harris @kwanetaharris.bsky.social · 20d
Kwaneta & Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause collaborated on a three-part series on menopause, incarceration, and the climate crisis for Scalawag.

Part 1: scalawagmagazine.org/2025/10/cool...

Part 2: scalawagmagazine.org/2025/10/the-...

Part 3: scalawagmagazine.org/2025/10/burn...
October 28, 2025 at 3:58 PM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
Kwaneta & Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause collaborated on a three-part series on menopause, incarceration, and the climate crisis for Scalawag.

Part 1: scalawagmagazine.org/2025/10/cool...

Part 2: scalawagmagazine.org/2025/10/the-...

Part 3: scalawagmagazine.org/2025/10/burn...
October 27, 2025 at 11:17 AM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
This summer, Kwaneta’s essay Behind the Walls was published in a special issue of ZEKE Magazine, Window Into Solitary.

Read her work and consider supporting as a paid Substack subscriber: kwanetaharris.substack.com/p/behind-the...
October 23, 2025 at 9:39 PM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
"Solitary, it kills you in ways that don't show up on death certificates. I've watched women die in there, not from violence, not from medical neglect, but they die from hopelessness. It kills a part of you. You're never the same." (Kwaneta Harris)

kwanetaharris.substack.com/p/journey-to...
Journey to Justice Bus Tour - Kwaneta's Story
Campaign to end the torturous practice of solitary confinement
kwanetaharris.substack.com
September 22, 2025 at 10:10 PM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
Read "The Power of Unity: Dismantling the Carceral State from Within," Kwaneta's latest piece for Substack. Her essay was the cover story for the August edition of San Francisco Bayview, a national Black newspaper that has been in circulation since 1976.

kwanetaharris.substack.com/p/the-power-...
August 30, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
“Our Commemoration of Black August Transforms These Spaces of Intended Destruction into Laboratories of Liberation” by @kwanetaharris.bsky.social for @solitarywatch.bsky.social.

Read her essay here:

solitarywatch.org/2025/08/22/r...
Remembering Black August from Prison: The Struggle Continues - Solitary Watch
This Black August, Kwaneta Harris reminds us of solitary's oppressive origins and calls us to resist and persist towards liberation.
solitarywatch.org
August 27, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
Huge congrats to @chriswblackwell.bsky.social, @kwanetaharris.bsky.social ,Deborah Zalesne and Terry Kupers, whose book ENDING ISOLATION: The Case Against Solitary Confinement, was reviewed in @theguardian.com:

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...
Ending Isolation review – a takedown of solitary confinement by incarcerated co-authors
New book looks back at the history of the controversial prison practice while pushing for its dismantling
www.theguardian.com
August 26, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
harmscommitted.com
Kwaneta Harris: @kwanetaharris.bsky.social
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Solitary Watch: @solitarywatch.bsky.social
Truthout: @truthout.org
August 22, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
harmscommitted.com
"The ultimate expression of law is not order—it's prison."

"Black August, observed each August since 1979, commemorates the deaths of Black liberation fighters who died in prison."

"[T]he same forces that murdered our ancestors continue to operate within these walls."
#USA #Incarceration
Remembering Black August from Prison: The Struggle Continues
This Black August, Kwaneta Harris reminds us of solitary's oppressive origins and calls us to resist and persist towards liberation.
solitarywatch.org
August 22, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
termitesunite.bsky.social
When our community is disappeared locally — disappeared from life into prisons — people on both sides of the bars are punished.

Holing human beings away does nothing to help society, heal community — and it disrupts their families, their loved ones, their children.

Here's a chance to mitigate harm
We are raising funds to help with the travel costs for incarcerated journalist Kwaneta Harris' children to visit her for the first time in a a decade. Kwaneta 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. Kwaneta has spent years of her life in solitary confinement, unable to contact her children even via phone calls for long stretches of time. Because her family lives in Detroit and Kwaneta is incarcerated in Texas, it is extremely costly and difficult to arrange in-person visits. This fundraiser seeks to help offset some of the costs of travel so that Kwaneta can see her children for the first time since 2015. The photo on this fundraiser was taken during the family's last in person visit in 2015. To read Kwaneta and her daughter Summer's incredible co-written piece on solitary confinement, click here. Summer I was only four months old when my mama got arrested. That’s what my grandma told me. For most of my life, she’s been just a voice on the phone or a character in stories others tell me. I’ve only seen her twice in person that I can recall. The first time I was 4, but that memory is so hazy I can’t tell if I’m really remembering it or just reciting what others have told me about that day. The second and last time, in October 2015 at 7 years old, is when I truly remember seeing her face-to-face. Mama somehow managed to hold all three of us: me, my sister and my brother by our hands at the same time. But her eyes stayed on me the longest. My siblings look just like her, but I’m my dad’s twin, so I guess she was trying to memorize my face. We were getting to know each other, and I remember telling her she “talked like a white girl” because her voice sounded different in person than over the phone. Then everything changed in January 2016. Mama was put in solitary confinement, and she stayed there until just recently, when I turned 16. We had been talking on the phone daily—me in Michigan, her in Texas—and then it all just stopped. No explanation, just silence. Grandma was crying all the time. My sister started acting out, getting involved with boys and being bullied at school. Nobody really explained what was happening, they just said, “Mama’s in the hole.” I was only 8 years old then, and I thought she was literally living in a hole in the ground. I would lay awake at night worrying about how she ate, where she slept, how she went to the bathroom. That’s when my stomach problems started. Everything I did in my daily life, I’d wonder how Mama was doing the same thing in that hole. Was she cold? Could she see the sky? We were supposed to visit Mama every year. Her friends and other people would pitch in for the trip. But suddenly we couldn’t go because “she’s in the hole.” I started thinking maybe she didn’t want us to come because they might put us in holes too. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because we weren’t supposed to tell people where our Mama was. I still don’t understand why me, my grandma, my brother and my sister all had to be punished too. They definitely succeeded at breaking our family apart. I had relatives on my dad’s side who were in Michigan prisons, and they came home on the weekends. Some of them even called home when they were in “the hole.” I didn’t understand that Texas had different rules. I was angry and convinced myself that Mama didn’t want to talk to me. We didn’t have phone calls anymore. Once, after years of silence, Mama called very late at night, grandma woke me up … but when I got on the phone, Mama thought I was my sister. That really hurt me, made me feel invisible.
August 12, 2025 at 1:46 AM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
@kwanetaharris.bsky.social has a fundraiser that's live with the goal of raising funds for her kids to come see her in person for the first time in a decade.

You can support her and her family here:

www.gofundme.com/f/bring-kwan...
Donate to Bring Kwaneta's Family Together Again, organized by Chelsea Halstead
We are raising funds to help with the travel costs for incarcerated journalist … Chelsea Halstead needs your support for Bring Kwaneta's Family Together Again
www.gofundme.com
August 11, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
Latest from @kwanetaharris.bsky.social is now up on @prismreports.org about tear gas inside Texas prisons.

"Guards deploy tear gas for cursing, for walking too slowly, for asking too many questions. It’s not about safety; it’s about control."

prismreports.org/2025/08/07/t...
Weaponized compliance: Tear gas in women’s prisons
Guards deploy tear gas for cursing, for walking too slowly, for asking too many questions. It's not about safety; it's about control
prismreports.org
August 7, 2025 at 5:37 PM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
A message from V, a letter to Kwaneta's teenage self, Black August, and a fundraiser to bring Kwaneta's family together. Read Kwaneta's latest Substack and support her family's fundraiser to offset travel costs for an in-person visit!

kwanetaharris.substack.com/p/happy-birt...

bit.ly/kwanetafamily
August 6, 2025 at 4:15 PM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
Kwaneta sends a very special congratulations to her friend and comrade Dutch on the premiere of SIN, a screenplay he authored, on Tubi. Kwaneta is deeply inspired by his prolificness and the depth of his work, especially as an incarcerated writer.

tubitv.com/movies/10004...
August 6, 2025 at 10:26 AM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
In her latest Substack — “Texas Hold’em: How the Prison System Keeps its Grip on Parole-Eligible People” — Kwaneta highlights the arbitrariness of the parole system, questioning the illogics of the prison system as a whole.

Read more and subscribe: kwanetaharris.substack.com/p/texas-holdem
July 31, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
@kwanetaharris.bsky.social wrote the preface for the guide "Best Practices in Defending Women and Gender Minorities," just released by Cornell Law School.

"A gender-sensitive lawyer wouldn’t have shamed me for my past," she writes.

dpw.lawschool.cornell.edu/publication/...
Best Practices in Defending Women and Gender Minorities — Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide
dpw.lawschool.cornell.edu
July 26, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
For the blog A Real Hood Square's Perspective, @kwanetaharris.bsky.social writes about the criminalization of LGBTQ+ intimacy inside Texas women's prisons.

Read it here: tharealhoodsquare.com/blog-page/f/...
Love Behind Bars: The Criminalization of LGBTQ+ Intimacy in Texas
Stories From Da Pen Series
tharealhoodsquare.com
July 23, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
@kwanetaharris.bsky.social penned the essay Chemical Chains for the latest TriQuarterly lit magazine.

It begins: " Dawn hadn't even broken when I watched my cellmate struggle with her makeshift solution."

www.triquarterly.org/issue-168/ch...
Chemical Chains — TriQuarterly
Dawn hadn't even broken when I watched my cellmate struggle with her makeshift solution. At 5:35am, with only fifteen minutes before we'd be marched out to work in the fields, she sat on the edge of h...
www.triquarterly.org
July 26, 2025 at 8:27 PM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
Kwaneta's latest piece on Substack highlights her bylines in @solitarywatch.bsky.social, Real Hood Square, @themarshallproject.org, @filmcomment.com.web.brid.gy, and Apogee Journal.

Thank you for reading!

kwanetaharris.substack.com/p/and-still-...
July 22, 2025 at 7:15 PM
kwanetaharris.bsky.social
Check out Kwaneta's latest writing published on Hood Square. She speaks out against prison staff’s use of disinformation to stigmatize, further marginalize, and additionally criminalize already incarcerated LGBTQ+ people.

tharealhoodsquare.com/blog-page/f/...
July 12, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
For @solitarywatch.bsky.social, @kwanetaharris.bsky.social brings visibility to the LGBTQ population in prison.

"When we exclude the most vulnerable members of our community from our celebrations, we betray everything PRIDE represents."

solitarywatch.org/2025/06/26/b...
Beyond The Rainbow: Remembering Our Most Forgotten - Solitary Watch
As PRIDE flags wave freely in society this month, our LGBTQAI+ community members, loved ones, and siblings face torture, erasure, and abuse.
solitarywatch.org
June 26, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
For Narratively, @kwanetaharris.bsky.social wrote a letter to her teenage self:

"But here’s what you need to know, young one: Something extraordinary will happen in that darkness."

www.narratively.com/p/letter-to-...
Letter to My Teenage Self: You Will Be Saved by the Power of Your Words
Sixteen years after going to prison, Kwaneta Harris tells her 13-year-old self everything she wished she knew sooner.
www.narratively.com
June 30, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
Great interview by Demetrius Buckley, incarcerated in Michigan, of @kwanetaharris.bsky.social , incarcerated in Texas. Both are from Detroit.

In the words of Demetrius, Kwaneta is "ten toes on her shit. I know when I leave here imma be rejuvenated."

www.apogeejournal.org/pieces/inter...
Interview with Kwaneta Harris
www.apogeejournal.org
June 30, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
Here's a video recording of the May 31 "Mothering Behind Bars" webinar hosted by the Incarcerated Womxn's Clemency and Support Project (IWCSP) and the Kwaneta Harris @kwanetaharris.bsky.social Defense Campaign.

www.patreon.com/posts/mother...
Mothering Behind Bars Webinar Recap | Conscious Prisoner
Get more from Conscious Prisoner on Patreon
www.patreon.com
July 3, 2025 at 12:51 PM
Reposted by Kwaneta Harris
empowermentave.bsky.social
@kwanetaharris.bsky.social for @filmcomment.com.web.brid.gy on writing a screenplay from prison with little access to outside films or media.

"Despite this disconnection—or perhaps because of it—my imagination has flourished."

www.filmcomment.com/blog/from-ce...
From Cell to Screenplay: Finding My Voice Behind Bars
New scene: the incarcerated journalist shares her painstaking journey to teach herself screenwriting in prison
www.filmcomment.com
July 8, 2025 at 3:15 PM