A Conversation With Talila A. Lewis

Talila A. Lewis Biography: Talila A. Lewis is a nonbinary multilingual (signed+written+spoken+felt) Black queer disabled abolitionist, educator, artist, archivist, storyteller, community lawyer and movement strategist. Lewis’s work has primarily focused on disrupting and abolishing the medical-carceral industrial complex; mapping past and present links between dis/ableism and all other forms of oppression and violence; and building power within and solidarity across marginalized communities. After creating the only national database of deaf/blind/disabled imprisoned people in the united states, Lewis founded the cross-disability abolitionist organization, HEARD (www.behearddc.org). As volunteer director of HEARD, Lewis spent over a decade dreaming, engineering, leading path-breaking intersectional grassroots advocacy on behalf of hundreds of disabled incarcerated people, including organizing successful long-term campaigns to free deaf/disabled Elders and wrongfully convicted people. Lewis has served as professor and consultant, and has spent many years developing and sharing a widely-cited living definition of dis/ableism that has been translated into numerous languages and applied toward liberatory ends by organizers around the globe. Lately, Lewis finds, creates, and practices freedom via poetry, music, and movement (often on quad skates). Join Lewis here: www.talilalewis.com