Angela Y. Davis is a distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. Recently Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundThePolice movement. Davis’s memoir will soon be published in a new edition by Haymarket Books.
The Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize is awarded to Dr. Angela Y. Davis for her lifetime achievements as a public intellectual advocating for racial, gender, and economic justice.