About Lewis

I am a longtime abolitionist activist and movement journalist, trained in the ‘school of Mariame Kaba’ as well as the shoe leather reporting skills of daily public radio journalism, where I covered economics and the environment for five years. In my twenty years as a writer-activist, I have worked for WBEZ, WYSO, Marketplace, and Scalawag Magazine, freelanced for dozens of independent outlets, and taught hundreds of activists to record and edit interviews and oral histories. In 2017 I was fired from public media for taking a stand against neutrality in the face of authoritarianism. Now I have a book and podcast, The View from Somewhere, about the myth of “objectivity” in journalism and how it has been used to exclude and punish journalists from oppressed communities. 

Before I started in journalism, I was the first volunteer coordinator for Project NIA, co-founder of the Transformative Justice Law Project, and co-founder of Black and Pink Southwest Ohio, and I received training from the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop and the Catalyst Project about organizing white communities in solidarity with BIPOC-led formations. Together with a collective of journalists and activists, in 2018 I co-founded Press On, a southern movement journalism collective which has been instrumental in driving conversations about the history and practice of movement journalism. My most admired journalistic ancestors include Marvel Cooke, Leslie Feinberg, Ida B. Wells, Andy Kopkind, and Ruben Salazar, who was murdered by L.A. County Sheriffs in 1972. 

I love talking to people and even more than that I love listening, learning, and unlearning. I am a midwestern southerner/southern midwesterner living in Durham, white and transgender, and certified open-water SCUBA diver and member of the emerging Searealists collective. I am also a proud queer co-caretaker of 11 chickens, three potbellied pigs, two Dorper sheep, and a dog named Turtle. We can talk about abolition journalism or we can just talk about pigs; you tell me.