MODERATOR
Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, which started in 2020, MCF launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award and has granted more than $330 million in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.
PANELISTS
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, legal scholar, and the author of the bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which helped to shift the national discourse on the US criminal punishment system and inspired racial justice organizing nationwide. She is a former associate professor of law at Stanford Law School and The Ohio State University and the former director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU in Northern California. Her work and writing have been featured in numerous outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, Democracy Now!, and The New York Times. She is currently a Scholar in Residence at Union Theological Seminary, where she is preparing to launch a new organization, Spirit of Justice, dedicated to nurturing the spiritual lives of those committed to the struggle for collective liberation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist whose bestselling books include The Water Dancer and the 2015 National Book Award winner Between the World and Me. Coates addresses audiences across the country on urgent cultural topics, including discriminatory housing policies, mass incarceration, deleterious interpretations of history, and his personal experiences growing up as an African American male in the United States. His newest book, the #1 New York Times bestselling The Message, grapples with how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. For more information on Ta-Nehisi Coates, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.
Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria. He fled Assad's Syria at eighteen and holds Algerian citizenship. He studied computer science at the Lebanese American University while working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, then served as programs manager at the British embassy in Beirut. In 2022, he moved to the United States to attend Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where he became a prominent figure in the student protests against the war on Gaza. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and New York magazine. He lives in New York, where he continues to fight the threat of deportation. No Land to Stand On is his first book.
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