Gina Clayton-Johnson

Gina is a Black feminist organizer, writer, and founder and executive director of Essie Justice Group, the nation’s leading advocacy organization of women with incarcerated loved ones. She is the central architect of the BREATHE Act, and is a leader on the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, a founding advisory council member of National Bail Out Collective, and a leading advocate for bail reform in California. Gina holds a JD from Harvard Law School. While at Mesa Refuge, Gina wrote about incarceration as a driver of the loneliness epidemic including lessons from organizing women with incarcerated loved ones and Black feminist institution builders. Find out more about Gina on her website.

As one of our featured 2024 spring Writers-on-the-Edge, Gina said:

“Working at the edge in my life’s project organizing women with incarcerated loved ones looks like persistent expressions of faith in an experiment. What if we could cultivate a community of healing and political activity for millions of the 1 in 4 women who have loved ones incarcerated in the United States? Arriving at 10 years in building this experiment at Essie Justice Group, the places that feel risky and enlivening to me are within the week-night gatherings of Essie women who meet, conspire, and become aware of our collective potential to win the compassionate society all people deserve. 

Writing at the edge means spending time in the uncomfortable balance of following a train of creative thought that feels at once risky and enlivening. Amidst constant distractions and layers of life experiences, the sustained vulnerability, humility, and introspection writing at the edge requires is hard to come by. Mesa Refuge makes writing at the edge possible. Running daily along forest-hidden streams, staring at ladybugs in the writing shed, peering through binoculars at birds—these were among Mesa’s unexpected ingredients for the courageous creativity I ultimately found within myself.”