I write, usually with other people, because I want to think through problems and questions from my collective organizing or teaching. Or because I want to document an event or a network or a campaign or a phenomenon. Or because I have BIG FEELINGS about something… Every collaborative writing project changes me! I love all the brilliant folks I think with: there are too many - I cannot list everyone!
Late 2025 favorite published pieces are about the family policing system in the US (article and book), and on guards’ unions power to shape statecraft.
Want a fast tour of some of the shorter and snappier pieces?
A celebration of the queer folks, particularly young people, who propelled the abolitionist movement: “Snaps! Collective (queer) abolition organizing created this moment” in Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People.(2022).
If not the cops, How Do We End Sexual Violence? Interview in Dissent (2022).
How does the artifact of children/childhood buttress the carceral/prison state? “The Problem Child”, translated in a collection in France, Politiser l’enfance(with the rad publisher éditions Burn~Août).
A meditation on people who have committed sexual-harm, “Awful Acts and the Trouble with Normal,” originally published in 2007 in the rad Chicago newspaper AREA Chicago, but reprinted in a few places including the brilliant Captive Genders.
In 2026 I am working a book project about infrastructures, focused on the ends/futures of two killing institutions, Riverview Asylum (in Canada) and Stateville Prison (in the US) tentatively called Closure: On the Afterlives of Captivity; and another book how university/college based workers are needed in this political moment Are We Revolting? A Self Help Book for University Workers.
Other random info about me?
Born in British Columbia, I moved when I was twenty-eight to Chicago.
I listen to all kinds of music but at the end of 2025 most popular for me: King Princess, Sudan Archives, (old) Everything But the Girl, Muna, (old & new) Me’Shell Ndegeocello, and Chappell Roan.
I tell people I am 5 feet and 10 inches tall which is not quite true.
I am a beekeeper, an OG chanterelle hunter, and while I REALLY want a dog and a turtle, I live with two card-carrying anarchist cats.
In summer I hustle massive amounts of free fruit to make jam or sauces (hoarding for the apocalypse).
I read a lot of things, particularly sci-fi (Rivers Solomon!). At the start of 2026 I am crushing on these books: Two Trees Make a Forest; Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072; Johnny Appleseed; A Woman in Berlin; One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This; Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
I fail to keep my fan-dom for Unrivaled and the WNBA in check.
I welcome communications, and music recommendations, even though I may be slow to respond.
I will figure out how to add a “contact me” to this website but in the meantime: er-ick-ca.bsky.social
Looking for networks to support and to get active?
Support folks inside, build abolition and make community:
California Coalition for Women in Prison (US)
National Council for Currently and Formerly Incarcerated Women (US)
Flat Out and Sisters Inside (AU)
Critical Resistance (US)
Prison Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (US)
Stateville Speaks (longest running prison newsletter in the US, I think) (US)
Joint Effort Collective (Canada)
Bent Bars Project (UK)
People Against Prisons Aotearoa (Aotearoa)
And so many more!