Afro-Ancestrality and Freedom: Visualizing Abolition in Brazil

Denise Carrascosa is a writer, lawyer, and full professor of literature at the Federal University of Bahia, in Brasil. She holds a Ph.D. in Theory and Criticism of Literature and Culture (UFBA) and completed postdoctoral studies in the History of Slavery in Brasil (UFRB). In 2010, she launched the abolitionist project Indocile Bodies and Free Minds: an art-education program for literary writing at the Women’s Prison Complex in Bahia, where she established, together with sentenced women inmates, the Free Minds Library (2012), enabling Sisters inside to access sentence remission through reading. 

Carrascosa wrote Técnicas e Políticas de si nas margens: literatura e prisão no Brasil pós-Carandiru (Appris, 2015); and edited Firminas em Fuga (Ed. Ogum’s, 2023), a poetry anthology by incarcerated women. As a guest author at FLIP 2023, she launched the abolitionist play O Pacto de Bocapiu: a cumplicidade silenciosa do femiNegricídio de Estado nas prisões (Ed. Ogum’s, 2023). At the 2024 Bahia Book Biennial, she launched her book of literary criticism essays from the past two decades, Corpo de Vento: Exu da Teoria – Travessias Crítico-Performativas pelas Artes Negras (EDUFBA, 2024). In 2024, she received the Esperança Garcia Award for her work in combating violence against women and was a finalist for the 66th Jabuti Award in the Reading Promotion Category. In 2025, she launched Bocapiu: the Hush Pact—the silent complicity of the State’s Blackfeminicide in prisons (Ogum’s Toques Press), translated by Jess Oliveira and Bruna Barros, at New York University and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In collaboration with Beatriz Carrascosa França, she edited the anthology Se Anastácia Falasse (Ogum’s Toques Negros, 2025) – a collection of short stories, testimonies, and chronicles by incarcerated women in Brasil.