Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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 California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press 2007). 

Other recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso 2024), as well as forewords to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg, (UGA Press), and to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (ed. HLT Quan. Pluto Press). 

Dr. Gilmore and Paul Gilroy co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke University Press 2021). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (dir. Kenton Card. 2021) features her internationalist work. Change Everything is forthcoming from Haymarket. 

Dr. Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Honors include The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis  and  Angela  Y. Davis); and the 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.