Struggle Within

Dan Berger is an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. His work on race, prisons, media, and American social movements has appeared widely in popular and scholarly journals. He is the author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press (2014). Berger is also the author or editor of three previous books: Letters From Young Activists, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, and The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism. A longtime activist, Berger is a cofounder of Decarcerate PA.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States. She examined how political and economic forces produced California’s prison boom in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, which was recognized by ASA with its Lora Romero First Book Award.

dream hampton has written about music, culture, and politics for twenty years. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Village Voice, The Detroit News, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, and a dozen anthologies, most recently Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson. A longtime member of the human rights organization Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, hampton helped to organize the Black August Hip Hop Concert Benefit to raise awareness about U.S. political prisoner for ten years. hampton directed The Black August Hip Hop Project, a film about the concert series, political prisoners, and MXGM.