“I believe that achieving racial equity requires we acknowledge that state violence has always been deeply rooted in, at the least, race-, class- and disability-based oppressions.”

Talila “TL” Lewis (they/them), is an abolitionist community lawyer, educator, and organizer who is entering a period of rest, recovery, and redefinition. Lewis’s work has primarily focused on abolishing the medical-carceral industrial complex and highlighting the inextricable links between ableism, racism, classism, and all other forms of oppression and inequity.

Lewis co-founded and served as the volunteer director of the cross-disability abolitionist organization, HEARD for a decade, where Lewis worked to free wrongfully convicted disabled people, created the first national database of imprisoned deaf/blind people, and supported incarcerated multiply-marginalized disabled people. Lewis serves as a movement consultant and strategist, and an attorney and “expert” on cases involving multiply-marginalized disabled people.

A graduate of American University Washington College of Law, Lewis served as the Givelber Public Interest Lecturer at Northeastern University School of Law and a visiting professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. As of the time of editing this bio, Lewis loves to dance, bake, create and weave words and languages, spend quality time with chosen family, and learning how to skate (on quads).