Look2Justice Co-Founder and Executive Director Christopher Blackwell opened the event, drawing on his experience as an incarcerated journalist, advocate and storyteller working to transform the criminal legal system from the inside out

He was joined by Katherin Hervey, a former public defender, award-winning filmmaker and restorative justice practitioner; Katie Sedgwick, a documentary filmmaker and psychotherapist whose work explores storytelling and healing; and Chris Panizzon, an award-winning producer whose documentary and narrative work has premiered at major film festivals including Sundance, Toronto, SXSW and Tribeca.

Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx writer, spoken word artist, and cultural strategist. Newly based in Chicago, Illinois, Hicks is the author of the critically-acclaimed debut poetry collection HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Julie Suk Award, and the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize.

Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist. In her writing, she illuminates how the experience of being incarcerated in the largest state prison in Texas is vastly different for women in ways that directly map onto a culture rooted in misogyny. Her stories expose how the intersection of gender, race, and place contribute to state-sanctioned, gender-based violence.

Jessica Schulberg is a senior reporter at HuffPost, covering the criminal legal system and immigration. Her work has led to legislative change, people being released from prison, and one man being spared from execution. She is the winner of a 2021 Deadline Club award, 2023 Writers Guild award and a 2025 New York Press Club award. She is a contributor to Scalawag and Haymarket Books’ The Press in Prison, a guidebook for working with incarcerated writers. She is a proud HuffPost Union shop steward and councilmember of the Writers Guild of America East.

Mari Cohen is senior politics editor at Jewish Currents and an award-winning reporter on American Jewish politics, Palestine/Israel, and the criminal legal system. She edits and coordinates the magazine’s work with incarcerated writers, a practice she piloted soon after joining the staff in 2020.

John J. Lennon is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, a contributing editor at Esquire, and the author of The Tragedy of True Crime, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2025. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. His work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, and his feature essay “The Apology Letter” was part of the Washington Post Magazine’s special issue that won the National Magazine Award. He is currently serving his twenty-fifth year in prison at Sing Sing for murder and drug sales. He will be eligible for parole in 2029.