Resources by, from, and about Mariame Kaba

Due to the release, and success, of her new book published by Haymarket, Mariame Kaba has been getting even more (deserved) attention. She is one of my personal heroes and someone that I continue to learn from all of the time. This is a resource list that I put together a while ago because I was always telling the people in my life about MK and this made it easier. But I just realized that others may find it helpful too so I’m making it public. I will continue to update it occasionally and welcome any suggestions or additions you have.

MK’s Work/Websites

• Being MK (Personal Website)
• Prison Culture (Blog about Prison Industrial Complex)
• TransformHarm.org (A resource hub about ending violence)
• @PrisonCulture on Twitter
• We Do this Until We Free Us (Book of essays!)

Questions MK regularly asks [herself] when [she’s] outraged about injustice:

1. What resources exist so I can better educate myself?
2. Who’s already doing work around this injustice?
3. Do I have the capacity to offer concrete support & help to them?
4. How can I be constructive?

(Some) Podcast Interviews:

• Beyond Prisons — Episode 19: Hope is a Discipline featuring Mariame Kaba
• Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice — Podcast Launch Event with Clint Smith, Mariame Kaba and Jared Marcelle
• Delete Your Account — Survived and Punished
• Hella Black Podcast — EP 64: Abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex featuring Mariame Kaba
• How to Survive the End of the World — The Practices We Need: #metoo and Transformative Justice Part 2
• Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill — Organizer Mariame Kaba: We Need a People’s Bailout to Confront Coronavirus
• Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill — Live from Brooklyn with Sy Hersh, Mariame Kaba, Lee Gelernt, and Nancy
• Justice in America — Episode 20: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition
• Millennials Are Killing Capitalism — Episode 26: Mariame Kaba — You Have A Right To Disrupt
• Moving Past Punishment — 151: with Mariam Kaba
• The Activist Files — Episode 12: Transformative justice in an era of mass criminalization, Mariame Kaba and Victoria Law
• The Leonard Lopate Show — The Future of Mass Incarceration in America Panel with Baz Dreisinger, Mariame Kaba and Derrick Hamilton
• Why is This Happening? Hosted by Christ Hayes — Thinking about how to abolish prisons with Mariame Kaba

Longform Interviews:

• Amy Goodman — Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid & How to Organize in the Age of Coronavirus (Democracy Now!)
• Chicago Reader — Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone
• Eve Ewing — Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People (Adi Magazine)
• John Duda — Towards the horizon of abolition: A conversation with Mariame Kaba (The Next System Project)
• The Nation — Abolition Is a Collective Vision: An Interview With Mariame Kaba
• Noah Berlatsky — Reimagining Justice: An Interview with Mariame Kaba (Urban Faith)

Books that MK has written or contributed to:

• Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (editors) — The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future
• Alice Kim (editor) — The Long Term
• Andrea J. Ritchie — Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
• Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (editors) — Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
• Fred Sasaki (editor) — Who Reads Poetry
• Javon Johnson and Kevin Coval (editors) — The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape
• Juliette Harris and Pamela Johnson (editors) — Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories
• Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan — Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators
• Mariame Kaba — Missing Daddy
• Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell — Lifting As They Climbed: Mapping the Histories of Black Women on Chicago’s South Side
• Mariame Kaba — We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
• Rebecca Zorach (editor) — Art Against the Law
• Sofia Bahena (editor) — Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline
• Zoe Samudzi and William C Anderson — As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation

MK’s Reading List about PIC Abolition from 4/4/2018

(Note about list from MK: I think people should just read broadly and think about what they read whatever that is. Lists feel reductive to me but I do understand why people need/want them.)

1. Dr. Angela Y. Davis — Are Prisons Obsolete?
2. Nils Christie — Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy
3. Prison Research Education Action Project — Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists
4. Jessica Mitford — Kind & Usual Punishment: The Prison Business
5. Ruth Wilson Gilmore — Golden Gulag
6. Ruth Morris — Penal Abolition: The Practical Choice
7. Critical Resistance — Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the PIC
8. George Bernard Shaw — The Crime of Imprisonment
9. Beth Richie — Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation
10. Peter Gelderloos — How Nonviolence Protects the State
11. Liat Ben Moshe (editor) — Disability Incarcerated
12. Albert Camus — Reflections on the Guillotine
13. adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha (editors) — Octavia’s Brood
14. Eric Stanley (editor) — Captive Genders
15. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral

MK’s Reading List for New Organizers

(Note about list from MK: It shouldn’t need to be said but I will say it anyway. The most effective organizers are well-read. The books I offer are just an introduction. They aren’t manuals for organizing. They will offer historical and broad tenets for good organizing.)

1. Barbara Ransby — Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
2. Charles M. Payne — I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom
3. Saul Alinsky — Rules for Radicals (Note from MK: I have many critiques and I think every organizer should read this)
4. Myles Horton — The Long Haul: An Autobiography
5. Team Colors Collective (editors) — Uses of a Whirlwind
6. Jane McAlevey — A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy
7. Paulo Freire — Pedagogy of the Oppressed
8. LA Kauffman — Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism
9. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral

Resources / Documents:

• Mutual Aid 101: Toolkit with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Last updated: April 13, 2021