It’s been said that prison journalism is having a renaissance. 

And Kwaneta Harris, a Texas-based journalist, is surely one of its leading figures. Her searing stories on solitary confinement, women’s health and extreme temperatures behind bars have appeared in publications across the country, including Prison Journalism Project.

In 2024, Harris argued in PJP that incarcerated citizens deserve the right to vote. She has reflected on the murder of George Floyd and the many painful resonances their lives share. And she recently penned a heartwarming tale about a cat that charmed the women in her facility.

“In this rural Texas prison, where the brown, flat landscape stretches endlessly, beauty is rare,” Harris wrote. “But this perfect creature, no bigger than my fist, had fur soft as cotton and eyes like green marbles.”

Harris is the author, along with fellow incarcerated journalist Christopher Blackwell, law professor Deborah Zalesne and psychiatrist Terry Kupers, of the book “Ending Isolation: The Case Against Ending Solitary Confinement.” Harris served eight years in solitary and has written extensively about her experience. 

Last year, Harris was named the Prison Journalist of the Year by the annual Stillwater Awards, which honors excellence in prison journalism. In 2024, she was awarded the Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellowship. She is currently a Movements Against Mass Incarceration social change fellow, a program of the Incite Institute at Columbia University, 

For Black History Month this year, PJP asked some of its stalwart contributors about the Black history that’s been most important to them. You can read their responses here. Below, we are publishing Harris’ interview in full. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

— PJP Editors

Q: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

Kwaneta: It wasn’t one moment but an accumulation. A guard said “Happy James Earl Ray Day” on Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s holiday. Another asked whether Black people even celebrate Father’s Day — because “they don’t know their fathers.” I was raised in Detroit, baptized in Black history. Entering a Texas prison was a cultural collision. The ignorance wasn’t accidental. It was manufactured, systemic, deliberate. I realized someone had to document these moments, these casual cruelties disguised as curiosity. Writing became my resistance. Every incident that should have broken me instead became evidence. I write because these stories deserve witnesses, and I refuse to let them disappear into the silence this system counts on.

Q: Does Black history influence your journalism?

Kwaneta: Black people have always been storytellers. Oral histories passed down through generations like inherited illness, survival encoded in narrative. This isn’t a craft I learned. It’s one I recognized in myself and embraced. My influences aren’t singular; they are collective: Ida B. Wells, who proved journalism could dismantle lynching culture; Marvel Cooke, the first Black woman hired at a mainstream white newspaper; Audre Lorde, whose poetry was political architecture; June Jordan, who wrote justice into every sentence; Saidiya Hartman, who recovers what history deliberately buried. These women taught me that marginalized voices don’t supplement the story. They are the story. Black history doesn’t influence what I write. It is the foundation everything else is built upon.

Q: How does your background inform your journalism practice?

Kwaneta: I am perceived as a Black woman before I am perceived as an American, before I am perceived as a journalist, before I am perceived as human. That sequencing shapes everything. I move through the world carrying that knowledge, so I write through that lens, not despite it. People claim objectivity as journalism’s gold standard, but there is no such thing as unbiased reporting. Every editorial choice reflects a worldview. Acknowledging my perspective is more honest than pretending neutrality exists. That transparency is a benefit. I see institutional failures others normalize. I recognize erasure others accept as fact. My background isn’t a limitation to overcome. It is the sharpest tool I own.

Q: Does your facility recognize Black History Month?

Kwaneta: The same way America does: performatively and whitewashed. We get a fried chicken meal. The library displays the same sanitized kente cloth arrangement with the same approved books about a domesticated MLK and a Rosa Parks reduced to tired feet. Nothing that challenges. Nothing that unsettles. No Malcolm. No Assata. No context for why Black people are disproportionately caged in the first place. 

Texas has effectively rebranded Black history as “critical race theory” and DEI propaganda, labeled it anti-American, and systematically attempted to remove it from education. The censorship inside these walls mirrors the censorship outside. Celebration without truth isn’t recognition. It’s containment dressed in African print.

Q: Who are some of your favorite writers?

Kwaneta: I am a voracious, autodidactic reader. I love June Jordan, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton. For nonfiction, I reach for Angela Davis, Victoria Law, Leigh Goodmark, Sarah Haley, Emily Thuma, Michele Deitch, Terry Kupers. Toni Morrison and Octavia E. Butler built entire worlds I’ve lived inside. I’ll also plug my own work, “Ending Isolation,” because representation includes us. I also read Arab-American, Latina, Caribbean and Asian women writers because liberation is not a single-culture project. What these works evoke shifts with my mood, my grief, my hope. Art meets you where you are, and where I am keeps changing.

Q: What issues do you hope to cover as a journalist?

Kwaneta: The abolition of the prison industrial complex. Full stop. Not reform. Not adjustment. Abolition. I want to expose the architecture of a system designed to fail, to cage, to profit from human suffering disproportionately extracted from Black and brown communities. I want to trace the money, name the investors, document the conditions, and center the voices of incarcerated people who are experts on their own oppression and rarely consulted. Black History Month, in here, is a mirror. It reflects exactly how much this country still fears an educated, historically grounded Black population. My journalism exists to give people the history they were deliberately denied and to make the case that another world is not only possible, it is necessary.