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. 

Gina Dent (Ph.D., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is Professor of Humanities and Faculty Director of the Institute of the Arts & Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has won awards for her teaching (Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award), advocacy (Chancellor’s Award for Diversity), and research (Innovator of the Year). Currently, she serves as Principal Investigator and Co-Director for Visualizing Abolition, a multidisciplinary project—involving exhibitions, events, fellowships, and academic programs—addressing the global crisis of incarceration through art and visual culture. Her recent collaborative projects grow out of her decades-long work as a social justice advocate—Abolition. Feminism. Now. (co-authored with Angela Davis, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie, Haymarket 2022), and Seeing through Stone (exhibition catalog, Marquand 2024). She works with several organizations nationally and internationally, including Columbia University’s Center for Justice and Australia’s Sisters Inside, primarily on justice-related concerns.

Professor Dent has offered graduate courses and faculty seminars in black feminisms, critical race studies, critical theory and postcolonialism, and legal theory and visual culture in Brazil (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador and Universidade Federal Recôcavo da Bahia, Cachoeira), Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and Sweden (Linköping University), as well as at the European Graduate School, and lectures widely on these and other subjects. She previously held positions at Princeton University and Columbia University and was Director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research at UCSC, as well as Principal Investigator for the University of California Multicampus Research Group on Transnationalizing Justice.