Lewis Raven Wallace

Abolition Journalism Fellow

Lewis Raven Wallace (they/ze/he) is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, NC. He is the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast.

Lewis previously worked in public radio and is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He was one of Project NIA’s first volunteers and advisory board members, a co-founder of the Transformative Justice Law Project and the Chicago Childcare Collective, and a co-founder of Black and Pink Southwest Ohio. He is white and transgender, born and raised in the midwest with deep roots in the South, where he now volunteers with Durham Beyond Policing and SeaRealism, an abolitionist SCUBA diving and public art project.

Lewis's current work centers around transforming the practice of journalism and storytelling towards an abolitionist, non-extractive, and community-driven frame, and studying the relationships between information, relational organizing, and social change. He is a 2021 Ford Global Fellow and a 2020 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow. In 2018 he cofounded Press On, a southern movement journalism collective. When he's not working, Lewis plays the accordion, reads and writes poetry, scuba dives, and spends time with his three potbelly pigs: Dogwood Daffodil, Venus Banana, and Gilbert.