Rev. William J. Barber II is an American Protestant minister and political activist who is the President and Senior Lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. From 2006 to 2017, Rev. Barber served as President of the NAACP’s North Carolina state chapter, the largest in the South and second largest in the country. He has been the lead pastor at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, NC since 1993.

Khalid Bashir is an administrator and educator who teaches English and a seminar course on identity as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion topics at Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC.

Emily Baxter is the executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and the founder of We Are All Criminals, a media-based advocacy project that seeks to challenge perceptions of crime, criminality, privilege, and punishment. Baxter is a photographer and the author of We are All Criminals, a collection of photographs, first-person narratives, and criminal justice statistics that demonstrate the destruction caused by decades of mass criminalization. She is also an attorney who previously worked as an assistant public defender in Minnesota, representing members of the Leech Lake and White Earth Bands of Ojibwe.

Dawn Blagrove is an attorney and activist who worked for close to a decade on behalf of incarcerated people at NC Prisoner Legal Services. She now serves as Executive Director of Emancipate NC, a community organization that works to dismantle structural racism and mass incarceration across the state. Emancipate NC’s focus areas include bail reform, ending youth confinement, police reform, and restorative justice.ls, a collection of photographs, first-person narratives, and criminal justice statistics that demonstrate the destruction caused by decades of mass criminalization. She is also an attorney who previously worked as an assistant public defender in Minnesota, representing members of the Leech Lake and White Earth Bands of Ojibwe.

Paul Brown grew up in Washington, D.C. and Alexandria, Virginia. He has an associate’s degree from Wayne Community College and has been writing for many years while incarcerated on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh.

John Charles Boger is an emeritus professor and former dean of the University of North Carolina Law School; he previously worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and during that time represented Warren McCleskey in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cameron Bynum is a poet and activist who has worked at the ACLU-NC; in 2020, Bynum became the Development Coordinator for Common Cause NC, an organization that works to promote voting and fair elections.

Kimberley Pierce Cartwright is a quilter and folk art painter who grew up in Hallsboro, North Carolina. She is a recipient of the 2018-2019 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council. Cartwright is also the news and public-affairs director at WNCU 90.7, North Carolina Central University’s campus radio station. See her artwork here and here.

Lynden Harris is the founder and director of Hidden Voices, a creative collective that undertakes art and storytelling projects designed to connect communities across difference. Hidden Voices staff worked for several years with men on North Carolina’s death row, helping them to discover and tell their own stories — then interpreting those stories into visual art, dramatic performances, and books that reveal the men’s memories, hopes, and humanity. Some of their stories will also be collected in the book, Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row, to be published in spring 2021.

Henderson Hill was the founder and first director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. He previously worked as a public defender in Washington, DC, a partner at the civil rights law firm, Ferguson Stein Chambers, and as director of the Federal Defenders of Western NC. He served as founding director of the 8th Amendment Project, and currently serves as Senior Counsel at the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, and co-director of the initiative RedressNC.

Alexis Hoag previously served as senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). Currently she is an associate research scholar and lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, as well as the inaugural Practitioner-in-Residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights.

Cerron Hooks began developing his artistic talent when he was a student at Independence School in Winston-Salem, NC, and he continues to draw while living on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, NC. See his artwork here.

Sherrilyn Ifill is the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), one of the nation’s premier civil rights law organizations fighting for racial justice and equality.

Johanna Jennings is an attorney who previously worked as an assistant public defender in Guilford County, NC, and as a staff attorney at CDPL.

Liz Komar is an attorney and former prosecutor who serves as the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Fair and Just Prosecution. Liz graduated with a B.A. in Peace, War, and Defense and a second major in history from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Seth Kotch is Associate Professor of American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and he published Lethal State, a history of North Carolina’s death penalty in 2019. He is also the author, with Robert Mosteller, of “The Racial Justice Act and the Long Struggle with Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina,” which appeared in the North Carolina Law Review in 2010. He directs the Southern Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of the American South.

Miriam Krinsky is an attorney who served as a federal prosecutor for 15 years, and she is currently the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization that seeks to bring together newly elected local prosecutors as part of a network of leaders committed to promoting a justice system grounded in fairness, equity, compassion, and fiscal responsibility.

Jin Hee Lee is the Senior Deputy Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and, in 2019, she appeared before the NC Supreme Court on behalf of death row prisoner Rayford Burke, a Black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury, successfully arguing his claims of racial bias in jury selection under the Racial Justice Act.

Shaakira Raheem is an educator and yoga instructor who cultivates online wellness spaces. She also teaches African history at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC.

Andre Smith is an activist and a teacher of meditation and anger management. Through the Kadampa Center in Raleigh, NC, he has worked with incarcerated people for more than a decade, and through Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, he advocated for enactment of the NC Racial Justice Act.

Clint Smith is a poet and scholar who works as a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the award winning book of poetry, Counting Descent, and forthcoming non-fiction book, How the Word Is Passed, which explores how different historical sites reckon with, or fail to reckon with, the history of slavery.

Tim Tyson is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His award-winning books include Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) and The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). His Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington’s Race Riot and the Rise of White Supremacy won the 2006 Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.