Real Cost of Prisons Comix

Lois Ahrens has been an activist and organizer for social justice for more than forty years. In 2000 she started the Real Cost of Prisons Project which brings together justice activists, artists, justice policy researchers, and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration to work together to end the U.S. prison nation. The Real Cost of Prisons Project created workshops, a website which includes sections of writing and comix by prisoners, a daily news blog focused on mass incarceration and three comic books. www.realcostofprisons.org

Craig Gilmore managed bookstores, published books, and edited a quarterly prison newsletter before transitioning into an anti-prison organizer. He is a co-founder of the California Prison Moratorium Project, a member of the Community Advisory board of Critical Resistance and was awarded the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Environmental Justice Activism in 2003.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

Kevin C. Pyle attended the University of Kansas where he received a B.F.A. in illustration, studying under illustrator Thomas B. Allen. He moved to Brooklyn N.Y. in 1988 to pursue a career as an illustrator. He has done illustrations for The New York Times Op-Ed page, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, The National Law Journal, The Progressive, Adbusters, and numerous other publications. In the early 90s he started contributing and co-editing World War 3 illustrated, America’s longest-running radical comics anthology. Much of the work done for WW3 illustrated was collected in his docu-comic, Lab U.S.A.: illuminated documents, published by Autonomedia in 2001. A non-fiction comic investigation of clandestine racist and authoritarian science, Lab U.S.A. won the Silver Medal for Sequential Art from the Society of Illustrators.

Sabrina Jones is a cartoonist and scenic artist. She is a co-author (with Marc Mauer) of Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling. Jones is the author of Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography and a contributor to World War 3 Illustrated, Wobblies!, FDR and the New Deal for Beginners, Yiddishkeit, and Radical Jesus. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Susan Willmarth has worked as a freelance editorial illustrator for New York Magazine, The Open Society, Writers and Readers Publishing, and Push Pin Press. Past work includes Black History for Beginners and McLuhan for Beginners.