Sonia Vaz Borges Author & Editor

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and socialpolitical organizer. She received her PhD in History of Education from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She is the author of the book, Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 (2019). As a result of her research Vaz Borges co-authored the short films, Navigating the Pilot School (2016) and Mangrove School (2022). Vaz Borges is also the author of the book Na Pó Di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, de Santa Filomena e da Encosta Nascente (2014), and editor of the Zines, Caderno Consciência e Resistência Negra (2007-2011). Vaz Borges is currently an Assistant Professor in the History and Africana Studies Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia (USA). Vaz Borges continues to write on education and liberation struggles and is now working on her concept of the “walking archive.” 

Maria Isabel Vaz was born and raised in Cape Verde in the Santiago Island, in the municipality of Santa Catarina. She  migrated to Portugal with all her family in 1972 during the colonial occupation in Cape Verde and the PAIGC liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau. In Portugal she worked as a domestic worker, where she married and became a mother of five. A humble and caring woman with strong values and beliefs, she made sure to transmit her knowledges, life experience, and social justice principles to her daughters. Gardening and farming are her passions, an inheritance brought from her life in the countryside in Cape Verde. Maria Isabel Vaz is now retired and lives in Amadora, Portugal.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prison abolitionist and prison scholar. She is the author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, and the award-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York.

Craig Gilmore is an organizer with the California Prison Moratorium Project, which he cofounded in 1998. He is a regular contributor to Prison Focus and is coauthor with Kevin Pyle of The Real Cost of Prisons Project. He has been active for years in Californians United for a Responsible Budget, the No New Jails Coalition, and LA Prison Times newspaper. Gilmore is a board member of A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles and in 2003 was awarded the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Environmental Justice Activism.