Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007) and Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022). With Paul Gilroy she edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke University Press, 2021). Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in late 2022.

Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in the New York Times Magazine. Honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A. Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); the Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (along with Angela Y. Davis and Mike Davis). In 2021 Gilmore was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.