ABOUT ME
Social Justice Engineer • Educator • Organizer • Storyteller • Archivist • Attorney • Artist • Writer-Signer-Speaker • Skater • Dancer • Seeker
Talila A. Lewis* is a multilingual abolitionist, artist, educator, writer, movement strategist, and community lawyer. Lewis was born into a family of educators, pastors, soldiers, dancers, musicians, artists, archivists. A proud legacy of the Black Southern griot and recitation traditions, Lewis is a prolific orator-signer-writer-storyteller.
As a Black queer disabled nonbinary person with roots in the Deep South who grew up all over the world (who travels incessantly & intentionally still), Lewis uses several spoken, written, and signed/tactile languages. As such, Lewis works, dreams, organizes, creates, and loves in between and across languages, borders, cultures, communities, and movements. In addition, The Black Church holds a special place for and to Lewis despite Lewis having long-since severed ties with organized religion. Recognized by Pacific Standard Magazine as a "Top 30 Thinker Under 30", Lewis has engineered and led innovative and intersectional social justice efforts that illuminate and address grave injustices within media, education, medical, and legal systems that have gone unaddressed for generations.
For the past twenty years, Lewis’s workthought has primarily focused on disrupting and abolishing the medical-carceral-impoverishment industrial complex; mapping past and present links between ableism and all other forms of oppression and violence (especially anti-Black/Indigenous racism and capitalism); and building power within and solidarity across multiply-marginalized communities. As the creator of the only national database of imprisoned deaf and blind people, Lewis spent nearly two decades advocating with and for hundreds of disabled defendants and incarcerated and returned people, including over ten years as the founding volunteer director of HEARD. As one of the only people in the world who has worked on numerous wrongful conviction cases of deaf/disabled people, Lewis has litigated, testified, taught, trained, and presented around the world on these and related topics. Lewis has also served as consultant for dozens of organizations, law firms, universities, and corporations on race, class, disability, gender, language rights and justice. In 2023, after many years of dreaming, engineering, leading path-breaking intersectional grassroots advocacy on behalf of hundreds of disabled incarcerated people, including organizing successful long-term campaigns to free deaf/disabled Elders and wrongfully convicted people, Lewis “passed the torch” to the next generation at HEARD and entered a period of rest, recovery, reflection, and redefinition. Lewis’s body of work/thought has been applied toward liberatory ends by organizers, educators, advocates, and communities around the world.
Lewis also co-created the Disability Solidarity praxis; is a founding member of the Harriet Tubman Collective (and lead drafter of HTC's charter document, “Disability Solidarity: Completing the Vision for Black Lives); and served as the Givelber Public Interest Lecturer at Northeastern University School of Law and a visiting professor at Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf. A 2014 graduate of American University Washington College of Law, Lewis has received awards from numerous universities, the American Bar Association, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, American Association for People with Disabilities, the Nation Institute, National Black Deaf Advocates, and EBONY Magazine, among others.
Lewis is still presenting around the world, and creating art, books, blogs, vlogs, and other offerings. In this chapter of life, Lewis also finds, creates, and practices freedom via meditation, yoga, writing, art, poetry, music, dreaming, and movement (often on quad skates). Lewis is a deeply interior person, but you may be able to find [usually just as a passing "story"] updates on Lewis’s blog and other online accounts, including Freedom Mapping Consulting (website coming soon) and Sweet Solidarity, the latter two of which Lewis created in 2018 as free[dom] spaces.
Lewis is a practicing anti-capitalist, collectivist, who has made their knowledge, talent, and time freely available. Lewis has, in turn, experienced decades of grotesque erasure, misappropriation, misrepresentation, mischaracterization, degradation, and white/abled/cis/het/wealth-washing, and hyper-commodification of Lewis and decades of Lewis's free labor and heartwork by all manner of people and institutions--culminating (and ending once and for all) with a "book" published in February 2024 by HarperOne / HarperCollins entitled "Be A Revolution" wherein the author, Ijeoma Oluo, makes a caricature of Lewis--and other Black/Indigenous disabled educators, ancestors, organizations/collectives--warping and commodifying our names, persona, identities, workthought, voice, language, organizations/collectives, and ancestors in the most vile sanist, ableist, classist, anti-Black/Indigenous, transmisic/anti-gnc ways [link to Lewis's personal response forthcoming]. Oluo attempts to repackage Lewis's work as her own. Be on guard for what Aimé Césaire calls the "watchdogs of colonialism" and only share information about Lewis and Lewis's workthought and organizations from Lewis. Again, Lewis speaks writes signs for themself. Only Lewis can interpret Lewis's work words thought signs. Only Lewis & those in right relationship with Lewis can tell Lewis's story. Only Lewis's communities can tell their stories.
Lewis is a 2018 Roddenberry Fellow, a 2018 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity, and a 2024 Soros Justice Fellow.
As a Black queer disabled nonbinary person with roots in the Deep South who grew up all over the world (who travels incessantly & intentionally still), Lewis uses several spoken, written, and signed/tactile languages. As such, Lewis works, dreams, organizes, creates, and loves in between and across languages, borders, cultures, communities, and movements. In addition, The Black Church holds a special place for and to Lewis despite Lewis having long-since severed ties with organized religion. Recognized by Pacific Standard Magazine as a "Top 30 Thinker Under 30", Lewis has engineered and led innovative and intersectional social justice efforts that illuminate and address grave injustices within media, education, medical, and legal systems that have gone unaddressed for generations.
For the past twenty years, Lewis’s workthought has primarily focused on disrupting and abolishing the medical-carceral-impoverishment industrial complex; mapping past and present links between ableism and all other forms of oppression and violence (especially anti-Black/Indigenous racism and capitalism); and building power within and solidarity across multiply-marginalized communities. As the creator of the only national database of imprisoned deaf and blind people, Lewis spent nearly two decades advocating with and for hundreds of disabled defendants and incarcerated and returned people, including over ten years as the founding volunteer director of HEARD. As one of the only people in the world who has worked on numerous wrongful conviction cases of deaf/disabled people, Lewis has litigated, testified, taught, trained, and presented around the world on these and related topics. Lewis has also served as consultant for dozens of organizations, law firms, universities, and corporations on race, class, disability, gender, language rights and justice. In 2023, after many years of dreaming, engineering, leading path-breaking intersectional grassroots advocacy on behalf of hundreds of disabled incarcerated people, including organizing successful long-term campaigns to free deaf/disabled Elders and wrongfully convicted people, Lewis “passed the torch” to the next generation at HEARD and entered a period of rest, recovery, reflection, and redefinition. Lewis’s body of work/thought has been applied toward liberatory ends by organizers, educators, advocates, and communities around the world.
Lewis also co-created the Disability Solidarity praxis; is a founding member of the Harriet Tubman Collective (and lead drafter of HTC's charter document, “Disability Solidarity: Completing the Vision for Black Lives); and served as the Givelber Public Interest Lecturer at Northeastern University School of Law and a visiting professor at Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf. A 2014 graduate of American University Washington College of Law, Lewis has received awards from numerous universities, the American Bar Association, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, American Association for People with Disabilities, the Nation Institute, National Black Deaf Advocates, and EBONY Magazine, among others.
Lewis is still presenting around the world, and creating art, books, blogs, vlogs, and other offerings. In this chapter of life, Lewis also finds, creates, and practices freedom via meditation, yoga, writing, art, poetry, music, dreaming, and movement (often on quad skates). Lewis is a deeply interior person, but you may be able to find [usually just as a passing "story"] updates on Lewis’s blog and other online accounts, including Freedom Mapping Consulting (website coming soon) and Sweet Solidarity, the latter two of which Lewis created in 2018 as free[dom] spaces.
Lewis is a practicing anti-capitalist, collectivist, who has made their knowledge, talent, and time freely available. Lewis has, in turn, experienced decades of grotesque erasure, misappropriation, misrepresentation, mischaracterization, degradation, and white/abled/cis/het/wealth-washing, and hyper-commodification of Lewis and decades of Lewis's free labor and heartwork by all manner of people and institutions--culminating (and ending once and for all) with a "book" published in February 2024 by HarperOne / HarperCollins entitled "Be A Revolution" wherein the author, Ijeoma Oluo, makes a caricature of Lewis--and other Black/Indigenous disabled educators, ancestors, organizations/collectives--warping and commodifying our names, persona, identities, workthought, voice, language, organizations/collectives, and ancestors in the most vile sanist, ableist, classist, anti-Black/Indigenous, transmisic/anti-gnc ways [link to Lewis's personal response forthcoming]. Oluo attempts to repackage Lewis's work as her own. Be on guard for what Aimé Césaire calls the "watchdogs of colonialism" and only share information about Lewis and Lewis's workthought and organizations from Lewis. Again, Lewis speaks writes signs for themself. Only Lewis can interpret Lewis's work words thought signs. Only Lewis & those in right relationship with Lewis can tell Lewis's story. Only Lewis's communities can tell their stories.
Lewis is a 2018 Roddenberry Fellow, a 2018 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity, and a 2024 Soros Justice Fellow.
*Important Note: Lewis is genderfluid/nonbinary and generally does not use any pronouns.
Please use Talila or Lewis in place of pronouns.
You may use “TL” if you are using a signed/tactile language.
Voicers/writers, please use my full name: Talila (pronounced tuh-LEE-luh)