Fellowship
The Abolition Journalism Fellowship works to support and expand the network of abolitionist journalists across the U.S.; provides messaging, communications, and journalism skills support to grassroots abolitionist groups; and continues to break down the false barrier between “activist” and “journalist” by convening spaces inclusive of both, and creating movement-driven infrastructure for journalism.
Abolition Journalism
Lewis Raven Wallace | 2022-2025 Fellowship
Abolitionist stories are being told to large audiences, with a focus on transformative and reparative practices, to ultimately shift the narrative around policing and criminalization in the U.S. centering the interventions of women and LGBTQQI communities. Empowered by narratives of community accountability and transformation, oppressed people can advocate locally for robust non-carceral solutions to violence, harm, and conflict. These efforts are supported by strong practices of journalism, documentation, and storytelling that both create an archive of abolition efforts, and serve as immediate tools for well-informed transition and transformation. This work is undertaken in service to the many abolitionist storytellers whose work has gone unrecognized in the field of journalism.
I am a longtime abolitionist activist and movement journalist, trained in the ‘school of Mariame Kaba’ as well as the shoe leather reporting skills of daily public radio journalism, where I covered economics and the environment for five years. In my twenty years as a writer-activist, I have worked for WBEZ, WYSO, Marketplace, and Scalawag Magazine, freelanced for dozens of independent outlets, and taught hundreds of activists to record and edit interviews and oral histories. In 2017 I was fired from public media for taking a stand against neutrality in the face of authoritarianism. Now I have a book and podcast, The View from Somewhere, about the myth of “objectivity” in journalism and how it has been used to exclude and punish journalists from oppressed communities. My new book, Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change from Within, will be out from Beacon Press in October 2025.
Before I started in journalism, I was the first volunteer coordinator for Project NIA, co-founder of the Transformative Justice Law Project, and co-founder of Black and Pink Southwest Ohio, and I received training from the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop and the Catalyst Project about organizing white communities in solidarity with BIPOC-led formations. Together with a collective of journalists and activists, in 2018 I co-founded Press On, a southern movement journalism collective which has been instrumental in driving conversations about the history and practice of movement journalism. My most admired journalistic ancestors include Marvel Cooke, Leslie Feinberg, Ida B. Wells, Andy Kopkind, and Ruben Salazar, who was murdered by L.A. County Sheriffs in 1972.
I love talking to people and even more than that I love listening, learning, and unlearning. I am a midwestern southerner/southern midwesterner living in Durham, white and transgender, and certified open-water SCUBA diver. I am also a proud queer co-caretaker of three potbellied pigs, two Dorper sheep, and a dog named Frankie. We can talk about abolition journalism or we can just talk about pigs; you tell me.”
Abolition Journalism Projects
