About me
I'm an award-winning author, trauma-informed journalist, playwright and Stanford John S. Knight Fellow based in Oakland, CA. Over the last decade the majority of my work has centered around exposing the inhumanity of solitary confinement and how it enables mass incarceration in U.S. prisons. My approach to my work in many ways reflects my unique life experiences. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, I became actively involved in the antiwar movement while finishing my undergraduate work at University of California, Berkeley. During this time, I also lived as an International Human Rights Observer in Zapatista indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico. In 2008, I moved to Damascus, Syria to study Arabic, teach Iraqi refugees, and start out as a journalist. In 2009, my life took a dramatic turn when I was captured by Iranian border guards while hiking near a tourist site in Northern Iraqi Kurdistan and imprisoned as a political hostage. I was tortured and imprisoned in incommunicado, solitary confinement for 410 days in Iran's Evin Prison. After my release in 2010, I became an internationally known advocate against the overuse of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. As a UC Berkeley Visiting Scholar, I conducted a 3-year investigation into isolation in U.S prisons, interviewing 75 prisoners in 13 prisons across the U.S. Based on this investigation, I wrote and produced a play, The BOX, which premiered in San Francisco in 2016 to sold-out audiences and toured the country in 2022. I also co-authored an anthology, Hell is a Very Small Place, comprised of the stories of incarcerated Americans I collected. My Op-eds and journalism have been published by The New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, CNN, San Francisco Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters and more.
