Join our friends at Critical Resistance for an evening of food, discussion and celebration with Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. She’ll be joined in conversation by Romarilyn Ralston (Program Coordinator for Project Rebound, Cal State University, Fullerton and California Coalition for Women Prisoners). We’ll use the evening to collectively sharpen our analysis of the impacts of policing on Black women and women of color, while deepening our commitment to powerful local and national campaigns fighting back against state violence. Following the program, Ritchie will sign copies of her book.

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant and police-misconduct attorney, and a 2014 Senior Soros Justice Fellow, with more than two decades of experience advocating against police violence and the criminalization of women and LGBTQ people of color. She is currently Researcher-in-Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the coauthor of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (AAPF, 2015) and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon, 2011). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Chicago.

Romarilyn Ralston is a black feminist activist and scholar. For three decades she has organized for gender and racial justice and against the violence of imprisonment––first while incarcerated at the California Institution for Women, then as a student at Pitzer College through internships with Crossroads for Women in Claremont, Borrowed Voices at Affleurbaugh-Paige Detention Center, and Prototypes in Pomona. Then later, as an advocate on the outside working with the YWCA Early Childhood Center and Ferguson Commission in St. Louis, Missouri. Romarilyn is currently the program coordinator of Project Rebound at the California State University-Fullerton, which provides formerly incarcerated students with tools and opportunities to help them thrive as scholars. She is also an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a recent graduate of the Women’s Foundation of California’s Women’s Policy Institute, and a graduate of JustLeadershipUSA’s Leading with Conviction Program and 2014-15 Coro Fellow in Public Affairs alumni. Romarilyn holds a B.A. with honors in Gender and Feminist Studies from Pitzer College and an M.A. in Liberal Arts from Washington University in St. Louis and received the 2018 Civil Rights Advocacy Award for the National Coalition of Black Women, Orange County Chapter.