Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she served as Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014-2024.
Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California 2007). She and Paul Gilroy co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Other recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso), and forewords to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg, (UGA Press), to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (ed. HLT Quan. Pluto Press), to the English translation of Making the World Clean by Françoise Vergès (Goldsmiths and MIT Press), and to Tithi Bhattacharya and Susan Ferguson, eds., Making Death and Life in Palestine (forthcoming, Pluto Press).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore has lectured around the world. The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (dir. Kenton Card. 2021) is a glimpse into her internationalist work. Honors include The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis); and the 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.