Biography

Angela Y. Davis is a longtime revolutionary, activist, organizer, writer, teacher and scholar dedicated to fighting all forms of oppression in the U.S. and overseas. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

 During the last twenty-five years, Angela has lectured in all of the fifty United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of nine books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiographym(2013), Women, Race, and Class (1981), Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998), The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998), “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (2010) and The Meaning of Freedom (2011), and Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (2015). Angela is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994, she received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.