Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander attended Vanderbilt University and Stanford Law School, and as a civil rights lawyer, she served as director of the Racial Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). During her time working for the ACLU, her opinions about the criminal justice system underwent a major shift; while she had initially believed that incremental reform could eventually lead to a fair criminal justice system, she began to suspect that a more radical change to the entire system was necessary. In 2005, she used a Soros Justice Fellowship to support work on The New Jim Crow. Upon its release, the book became a huge success, winning five awards and spending a year on The New York Times bestseller list. Alexander continues to campaign for criminal justice reform. Having held a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, in 2016 Alexander announced she was “walking away from the law,” resigning from Ohio State in order to take a position as Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary.