Kwaneta Harris

Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist and Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow. In her writing she illuminates how the experience of being incarcerated in the largest state prison in Texas is vastly different for women in ways that directly map onto a culture rooted in misogyny. Her stories expose how the intersection of gender, race, and place contribute to state-sanctioned, gender-based violence.

Harris is an abolition feminist and through her writing she offers a glimpse inside the brutal criminal legal system, with hope to reimagine effective non-carceral solutions for those who harm. She writes about censorship, healthcare, climate and how they affect systems-impacted people. Her writings have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Solitary Watch, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, The Marshall Project, Scalawag, Prism, The Appeal, and Teen Vogue, among others. She writes on Substack at Write or Die.

Harris authored a segment on This American Life and was interviewed for a documentary by Al Jazeera about solitary confinement, where she was detained for over eight years. She co-authored a book – Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement – which was released through Pluto Press in September 2025. She is currently working on a book about teenagers from juvenile hall who later became her neighbors in adult solitary confinement.