Imani Altemus-Williams

(she/her)

Community Archives Collaborative Project Manager

Raised in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, Imani received a BA in Global Studies from the New School University and MA in Indigenous Journalism from the Sámi University of Applied Sciences. She serves on the board of directors of The Pōpolo Project and Hawai‘i Women in Filmmaking, is a current Peace Studio fellow, and was previously a fellow with the International Documentary Associations’ Documentary Magazine. Passionate about stories that illustrate the collective experiences of colonized peoples, Imani is a strong believer in the liberatory power of memory work, transformative justice, interpersonal and collective healing.

Jennifer Arévalo Ferretti

(she/her)

Documentation and Archives Director

Jennifer Arévalo Ferretti (she/her) is an artist and information professional living on the unceded lands of the Susquehannock, Nentego (Nanticoke), and Piscataway peoples, known as Baltimore, Maryland. With over 16 years of experience in libraries, archives, and museums, she has held roles such librarian, archivist, and curator. Her work is grounded in critical praxis, focusing on the research methodologies of creators and non-Western forms of knowledge making and sharing. In 2016, to address gaps left by institutions and the profession, she founded We Here®️, a supportive community for folks who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color working in libraries and archives.

Murphy Anne Carter

(she/her)

Community Programs Director

Murphy joined Texas After Violence in 2020 after years of teaching creative writing at Travis County Correctional Complex and serving as executive director of Freehand Arts Project. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where she majored in Plan II Honors, English Honors, and History, Murphy moved to New York as a member of New York City Teaching Fellows and taught AP Literature and Composition and creative writing classes at a Title-1 high school in Hell’s Kitchen. She returned to Austin and began organizing writing classes at the county jail in addition to poetry workshops from visiting poets, Eileen Myles, Ebony Stewart, Morgan Parker, and Derrick Brown. Having taught nearly every age, from PreK to the elderly, Murphy believes in community storytelling, narrative power, and memory as transformative, abolitionist tools for both the personal and political. She recently graduated from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and continues to pursue social justice in state and local carceral systems.

Raquel Garcia

Community Archives Manager

Raquel is a graduate student at the University of North Texas pursuing a degree in Archival Studies and Imaging Technology. After working with vulnerable populations during her nursing career, she wishes to advocate for those impacted by mass incarceration and institutional violence and assist them in sharing their experiences. As a child, Raquel thoughtfully listened to her mother’s stories about her home country, and attributes these stories as a foundation of her identity. Raquel views storytelling as an important tool for reflection and social development. Raquel wishes to facilitate others to tell and share their stories to ultimately elicit change and reform the prison system.

Jasmarie Hernández-Cañuelas

(she/her)

Development and Communications Coordinator

Jasmarie is a lover of stories and the people who tell them. She believes community archiving gives people the autonomy to reclaim their own experiences and combat erasure, making it one of the many tools for liberation and abolition. She started working with Texas After Violence Project as an intern in 2022 upon graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. As an undergrad she worked with various social justice initiatives such as the UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity and Latin American Working Group, and even conducted an independent oral history project in her island of Puerto Rico. She also currently volunteers with the Austin History Center Association. Jasmarie spends most of her free time performing musical numbers at home, laughing at a comedy show, swimming, or choosing her next sitcom to binge.

Susannah Sheffer

(she/her)

Access to Treatment Director

Susannah Sheffer is a clinical mental health counselor and a writer and researcher focusing on the impact of the death penalty. She designed the first training series dedicated to working in clinical settings with family members of individuals who have been sentenced to death and has been an invited expert on this topic in a range of national and international forums, including a United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights high level side event in 2016. Previously, Susannah worked with Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights and directed that organization’s No Silence, No Shame project, which focused on the traumatic impact of losing a family member to state execution. She is also the author of the 2013 book Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys, based on interviews with 20 attorneys who had lost at least one client to execution.

Gabriel Solís

(he/him)

Executive Director and Ex-Officio Board Member

Prior to returning to Texas After Violence Project as its executive director in 2016, Gabriel was a capital post-conviction investigator for the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, criminal justice research associate at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and project coordinator of the Guantánamo Bay Oral History Project at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. Gabriel is the recipient of the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction. His writings have appeared in Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, Oxford American, Scalawag, Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power, and Kula: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies.

Gabriel was named the 2023 University of California Regents Fellow in Information Studies.

Gabriel is currently advising on the creation of a digital archive for government records related to the Trump Administration’s Family Separation and Detention policies. Gabriel is also working with Shift Collective to evaluate the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Recordings at Risk grant program. Gabriel also currently serves on the Advisory Team for We Here’s Dream-Shaping Our Community project and the Advisory Board for the Community-Centered Archives Practice: Transforming Education, Archives, and Community History (C-CAP TEACH) project at UC Irvine.

Previously Gabriel served as a consultant for the Ford Foundation Reclaiming the Border Narrative initiative, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project, the UCLA Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration project, Shift Collective’s Historypin research exploring decentralized digital storage for community archives, and as a Fellowship Mentor for Fanny Garcia’s Separated, a project documenting the lived experiences of parents separated from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border under the “zero tolerance” policy in 2018.

Jennifer Toon

(she/her)

Community Advocacy Manager

Jennifer Toon is a passionate prison abolitionist. As a formerly incarcerated woman, her experience with the criminal legal system began at age 15 when she was adjudicated under Texas determinate sentencing laws. Her conviction started a long journey through 27 years of criminal justice involvement. Jennifer has been published in The Texas Observer, The Marshall Project, The Guardian and is also the co-host of On the Rec Yard: Women’s Prison Podcast. Jennifer aspires to use her lived experience to bring attention to the often-forgotten voices of other system-impacted women, youth, and people with disabilities. She lives in Austin, Texas with her cat Taylor, who embodies the mischievous energy of Taylor Swift.

Hannah Whelan 

(she/her)

Associate Director

Hannah joined Texas After Violence in February of 2022 after being introduced to us while studying Archival Science as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As the daughter of an incarcerated father and someone who believes deeply in the affective, testimonial power of personal materials, she is interested in personal archiving, posthumous rights in records, and archival methods that can be used to subvert the tactics of surveillance and silencing that occur through state-maintained archives.

Hannah’s research focuses on how personal artifacts and works of creative expressions generated by the incarcerated can be protected in instances of in-custody death and the subsequent death review and psychological autopsy processes that ensue; her archival practice is concerned with how to care for these materials once they are retrieved.

Aside from her work as an archivist and researcher, Hannah loves never-ending sentences, Burt’s Bees chapstick (not sponsored), walking around looking at flowers and plants, and sending her friends unsolicited playlists.

Cyrus Gray

2024 Visions After Violence Fellow

My name is Cyrus L Gray III. I’m a 29 year old black man from Houston, TX. In 2018 I (along with my childhood friend DeVont Amerson) was wrongfully arrested and accused of a capital murder that occurred in San Marcos, Texas, in 2015. I spent 5 years incarcerated pretrial, with NO BOND, until I was finally taken to trial. A trial that lasted nearly 3 weeks only to end in a mistrial. Several months after that I was finally given a bond and was able to get out of jail awaiting a second trial date . Since then my case has been dismissed and I have been a free man for nearly a month now. Prior to my arrest in 2018, I worked as a Physical Therapy Technician, had my own business in Personal Training, worked as a sales associate for a tailored suit and tie company out of Dallas, managed local artists in the Houston area, and was working on a clothing brand.

Since my arrest in March of 2018 I’ve advocated as much as possible for myself and others in Hays County Jail and have been able to work alongside MANO AMIGA in such advocacy. I’ve worked with the Austin Justice Coalition, Texas After Violence Project (TAVP), The Fair Defense Project, VERA Institute of justice, The Innocence Project and Professor Mathew Clair of Stanford University. I’ve spoken multiple times at Hays County Commissioners Court hearings and at the Capital in front of the Criminal Justice Committee and the Jail Standards Committee. I have published pieces with the Inquest forum of Harvard Law School, TAVP & the Innocence Project, as well as in local news platforms. In regards to the importance of affordable bonds and a much needed change in the criminal legal system. My advocacy has included but is not limited to the creation of multiple Zines outlining the disparities in justice within our criminal legal system and communities at large. Now that my case has been resolved I am excited to continue my advocacy and am looking forward to enrolling in law school to have an opportunity to be apart of the good difference.

Hollis Hammonds

(she/her)

Artistic Collaborator

Hollis Hammonds is an Austin-based artist and a Professor of Art at St. Edward’s University. Her dystopian drawings and found-object installations have been widely exhibited throughout the US. Built on threads of personal memory tied to the public collective consciousness, her work reflects the evidence of war, natural disasters, environmental degradation, and violence in America. Her recent collaboration with poet Sasha West has resulted in a new body of work related to climate change and climate grief. Hammonds is the author of Drawing Structure: Conceptual and Observational Techniques, and has had her creative work featured in multiple publications. She has been an artist in residence at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Vermont Studio Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, and is the Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

Celeste Henery 

(she/her)

Program Advisor

Dr. Celeste Henery is a cultural anthropologist working at the intersections of race, gender, and health; specifically, what it means to feel well, individually and collectively, in these troubling times. Celeste’s broader research interests include black ecologies, feminisms, and diaspora studies. She currently works as a Research Associate in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her writing on black life across the diaspora has been published in various academic journals and appears on the blog Black Perspectives. In addition to her academic endeavors, Celeste works as a mitigation specialist and guides others to creatively navigate their projects and lives.

Emily Henry

(they/she)

Documentation and Archives Intern

Currently located in Brooklyn but originally from North Texas, Emily is a current graduate student at Queens College, where they are pursuing their MLIS with a concentration in archives. With previous experience working in community archives, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Emily values the care-centric approach community archives practice. Emily’s archival interests meet at the intersection of memory work, personal archival practices, and the value of preserving the “everyday.” In her free time, she can be found playing with her cat, Suki, attempting to finish her reading goal, and watching 2000s teen dramas.

Tiffany Ike

(she/her)

Artist in Residence

Tiffany Ike is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and scholar from Houston, TX. She utilizes different mediums including spoken word poetry, theater, visual art, and filmmaking, to discuss ideas of faith, history, and liberation in all its forms. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s First Wave Program, Tiffany studied hip hop through a “performance as activism” lens. She has had her visual work showcased in spaces such as the African American Museum in Philadelphia and performed spoken word poetry on stages like Tedx Houston. She received her MFA in Writing & Producing for Television at Loyola Marymount University, where she studied the evolution of Black TV and examined television as a historical record. Tiffany is now currently a lecturer at her alma mater. She believes in intersecting her academic and artistic interests with teaching and community organizing in any city she finds herself living in, collects fancy socks, and every once in a while relives her hoop dreams in the gym.

James D. Jones

(he/he)

Writer in Residence

James D. James is an incarcerated organizer, writer, and artist from Decatur, Illinois. Over the past few years, he’s had the privilege of engaging affirming, healing work with organizers from across the country who are similarly committed to shedding light on and sharing light within the carceral system and the communities it impacts. Together they built the Prison Solidarity Project, an inside/outside writers network that has grown to include over 1000 participants.This network has spawned book clubs, art shows, participatory defense committees, mutual aid infrastructure, reentry support teams, and ever-strengthening solidarity. In 2022 James was selected with his comrade Caren Holmes for the Mavel Cooke Fellow for Abolitionist Journalism by Shadowproof Press. That same year they produced an exhibition, titled “Visitation,” featuring the art and creativity of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated abolitionists at the All Street Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side. Follow @free.rocko on Instagram to see more of their work.

Robert Lilly

2024 Visions After Violence Fellow

Rob Lilly is a true student of life, dedicated to making the world a more just place. Having overcome significant obstacles in his 53 years, he now uses his experience to push for criminal justice reform. Rob’s work is grounded in the abolition framework, as taught by Angela Davis. He earned his degree from Abilene Christian University in 2015 and currently serves as a Criminal Justice/Participatory Defense Organizer at Grassroots Leadership.

Mark Menjívar

(he/him)

Artistic Collaborator

Mark Menjívar is a San Antonio based artist and Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. His art practice primarily consists of creating participatory projects while being rooted in photography, oral history, archives, and social action.

Bryn Starbird

(she/her)

Access to Treatment Research Assistant

Bryn Starbird, JD, LPC-A, started her work with AVP as a volunteer in 2017, after graduating from Berkeley Law School with a focus on restorative justice. The stories Bryn heard during her work with the organization inspired her to go back to school to become a mental health counselor. She now practices therapy in Austin, TX and continues to help with research work for AVP’s Access to Treatment Initiative.

Jessie Whittley

(she/her)

Access to Treatment Project Assistant

Jessie has a background in nonprofit education from Houston and has been living in Austin since 2005. After receiving bachelor’s degrees in French and Studio Art from UT Austin, she worked in local school fundraising and events, school web design and development, and medical device support for international pediatric transport teams. During the pandemic, Jessie volunteered for StrongerTogether ATX and area resource centers to assess community needs. She is currently raising two fun children, completing a master’s in mental health counseling, and has been assisting Susannah with the Access to Treatment initiative since the summer of 2023. She is thankful for the opportunity to be involved in the work that TAVP does to uplift an underrecognized and underserved population.

Mandi Zapata

2024 Visions After Violence Fellow

Mandi Jai Zapata, a resilient 33-year-old, has over a challenging seven-year period of incarceration. Despite the hardships, Mandi is a devoted mother of two, fueled by an unwavering hope and a compassionate heart for people. With a profound belief in the power of shared stories, Mandi aspires to empower others to express their narratives, fostering wisdom and personal growth within the community.

Lee Greenwood-Rollins

Community Advisor

Lee Greenwood-Rollins is the mother of Joseph Nichols, who was executed on March 7th, 2007. She shared her story with the Texas After Violence Project and discusses Joseph’s life, his friends, his giving character, and the injustices they suffered at the hands of the Texas criminal legal system. Lee is an accountant and works with TAVP as a part of their Community Advisory Council.

Lovinah Igbani-Perkins

(she/her)

Visions After Violence Fellow, Community Advisor

A native of Detroit Michigan, Lovinah Igbani-Perkins has spent most of her life in Houston and considers herself a true Houstonian. After going to prison for the second time, it was behind bars in TDC, where she came to know her purpose in life. She works full time as an Alcohol & Drug Counselor for a non-profit, working with Houston’s homeless population. Lovinah is an advocate for those in prison and believes prison reform is long overdue. Having just completed her master’s degree, she recently accepted a new position with Houston Recovery Center as an Assistant Program Manager.

Ayshea Khan

Community Advisor

Ayshea Khan is a community archivist living in Austin, TX with a passion for activating community stories to facilitate social change. By day, she serves as the Asian Pacific American Community Archivist at the Austin History Center, Austin Public Library. She is also a longtime volunteer and collaborator with SAADA and is proud to serve as their current Board President. Ayshea holds a B.S. in Cinema & Photography from Ithaca College and she received her MSIS in 2016 from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Certified Archivist, a 2021-2023 RBS-Mellon Cultural Heritage Fellow, and currently serves in leadership positions with the Society of Southwest Archivists and Asian Pacific American Library Association.

Maggie Luna

Community Advisor

Maggie Luna is a Policy Analyst and the Community Outreach Coordinator at the Texas Center for Justice and Equity, which she joined in early 2020 as a Hogg Foundation Peer Policy Fellow.Her passion for justice policy is fueled by her own lived experience with system involvement and substance use, including incarceration at state and county levels in Texas. J A graduate of the Smart Justice Speakers Bureau at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Maggie coordinates the Statewide Leadership Council, which TCJE launched to elevate the voices of system-impacted people in local and state policy reform. Maggie also holds a Re-Entry Peer Specialist Certification.

Julieta Suárez Calderón

(they/them)

Community Advisor

Julieta aims to love transformative justice into practice.

They come to abolition from lived experiences as a queer GNC immigrant in a mixed-status family and hold deep gratitude for all their abolitionist teachers and dreamers.

They hold a B.A. in Women and Gender Studies and Race, Indigeneity, and Migration from UT Austin. During their time in Austin, were involved in grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and nonprofit work focused on immigrant and housing justice, building relationships with folks directly impacted by policing and detention/incarceration. Queerness and migration shape Julieta’s freedom dreams to reimagine justice and accountability in community and to build networks of collective care.

They enjoy cooking and eating, learning languages, spending time with kiddos, outdoor adventures, yoga, and art appreciation. They are (finally!) learning to play the drums and feel most themselves when they’re singing, dancing, and by the ocean <3.

If interested in connecting with Julieta, email them at julieta@texasafterviolence.org.

Rachel E. Winston

Community Advisor

Rachel E. Winston is an archivist and curator based out of Austin, TX, where her work centers the documentation and representation of the Black Diaspora within cultural institutions. She is the founding Black Diaspora Archivist at The University of Texas at Austin and leads the university’s effort to build a special collection documenting the Black experience across the Americas and Caribbean.

Sam Benavides (she/her)

Board Member 

Sam Benavides is a recent college graduate of Texas State University, where she earned her degree in Public Administration and Political Communication. She is from Laredo, Texas, and is the Communications Director for Mano Amiga in San Marcos, Texas, where she is committed to centering the voices of directly impacted individuals in Mano Amiga’s groundbreaking legal reform advocacy efforts. She previously worked with MOVE Texas, a statewide nonpartisan nonprofit organization that works to build power in underrepresented youth communities. It was through her work with MOVE that she met the Mano Amiga team, and formally joined the organization in the summer of 2020. You can view Sam’s interview about her work and her personal experiences with Texas After Violence here.

Alexa Garza (she/her)

Board Member

Alexa Garza’s passion for advocacy is rooted in her personal experience of incarceration and the stigma she faced in her community upon release. In 1999, she was 19 years old and sentenced to 20 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ).  On the day she entered the criminal justice system, she promised herself that she would never look back or waste a moment of time. It is a promise she continues to keep. Alexa has a B.A. in business administration from Tarleton State University and is certified as a braille transcriber through the Library of Congress. 

Alexa hopes to use storytelling to change the narrative about system involvement. She also hopes that lending her unique perspective as a formerly incarcerated woman of color will help elevate the often neglected voices of other currently and formerly incarcerated women of color and shine a light on the kinds of roadblocks they encounter and the dearth of support they receive.

Jim Kuhn (he/him)

Board President

Jim Kuhn is an Associate Director at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Jim has over thirty years of experience in archives, rare books, and special collections librarianship, including work in administration, grant writing, digital preservation, metadata management and cataloging, and support for oral history projects.

Walter C. Long 

Founder and Board Member

Walter C. Long, an attorney practicing appellate law in Austin, Texas, founded the Texas After Violence Project in 2007 hoping it might help foster dialogue between Texans on all sides of the death penalty debate about the human needs revealed in the stories collected by the project, so that Texans might move beyond polarized discussions and seek together a less violent future. With strong interests in human rights and restorative justice, Walter has found that his most rewarding work as an attorney has been past years of litigation on the juvenile death penalty issue and more recent law/psychology public policy advocacy for recognition of the death penalty as a trauma-inducing system and a public health concern. In addition to continuing to conduct litigation, Walter completed a master’s degree in 2014 in counseling psychology. He also has degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in history, literature, and law, and an MA in religion from a Presbyterian seminary. He has published articles on ethics, psychology, religion, literature, refugee policy, and capital punishment.

A. Naomi Paik

Board Member

A. Naomi Paik is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016; winner of the Best Book in History Award, 2017, Association for Asian American Studies; finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize for best book in American Studies, American Studies Association, 2017), reads testimonial narratives of subjects rendered rightless by the U.S. state through their imprisonment in camps. She has published articles in Social Text, Radical History Review, Cultural Dynamics, and Race & Class and has forthcoming pieces in Humanity, e-misferica, and the edited collection, Guantánamo and the Empire of Freedom. A board member of Radical History Review, she is co-editing three special issues of the journal—on “Militarism and Capitalism,” “Radical Histories of Sanctuary,” and “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination.” She is also developing a new project on sanctuary and another on military outsourcing. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

Milad Taghehchian

Board Member

Milad Taghehchian is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and Certified Financial Planner (CFP) with a proven track record of excellence in the financial industry. With over 20 years of experience, he has demonstrated expertise in tax, estate, investment management, real estate, and wealth management

Throughout his career, Milad has served a diverse clientele, ranging from individuals and families to businesses and corporations. His commitment to personalized service and attention to detail has earned him a reputation as a trusted wealth manager, empowering clients to achieve their financial goals and optimize their financial well-being.

Milad’s proficiency enables him to provide comprehensive solutions that align with his clients’ unique needs and circumstances. He stays at the forefront of industry trends, ensuring he can offer the most relevant and innovative financial advice.

Beyond his professional accomplishments, Milad is known for his approachable demeanor and dedication to building long-lasting client relationships based on trust and integrity.