Baz Dreisinger is an American academic, cultural critic and activist. She is a professor of English at City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the founder of the Prison-to-College Pipeline and the Executive Director of the Incarceration Nations Network.
Early life
Dreisinger was born in the Bronx, New York. She graduated as the valedictorian of her class from Queens College, City University of New York, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1997. She attended Columbia University for graduate school, where she earned a Ph.D. in English with a specialty in African-American studies in 2002. Her Ph.D. dissertation became her first book: Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture.
Career
Dreisinger is a tenured professor of English at CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she is also the Founder of the Prison-to-College Pipeline program. The program, founded in 2011, offers incarcerated men throughout New York State a way to increase their higher education options and advocates for higher education access for those incarcerated and formerly so.
Published Works
Dreisinger is the author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture and Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, which she wrote after traveling to nine countries to reimagine modern carceral systems. The book offers a radical rethinking of one of America’s most devastating exports and national experiments–the modern prison system–and was named a Notable Book of 2016 by the Washington Post; it was also lauded by The New York Times, NPR, the LA Times and many more. Dr. Dreisinger was named a 2018 Global Fulbright Scholar for her work promoting education and restorative justice internationally; she is currently a Fulbright Specialist Scholar, with planned work in Australia, South Africa, Jamaica and Trinidad.
In 2018, Dr. Dreisinger founded the Incarceration Nations Network, a global network and think tank that supports, instigates and popularizes innovative prison reform efforts around the world. INN has more than 100 partners around the world and has built a multimedia web platform to showcase global justice and prison reform work. INN also coordinates Global Gatherings and virtual events, produces tool kits and briefs on policy issues and is producing a docu-series, narrated entirely in the voice of those directly impacted by the justice system worldwide, about mass incarceration in a global context. Together with conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, Dreisinger and INN have collaborated to create the traveling exhibition and installation, The Writing On The Wall, constructed from over 2,000 pages of writing and art by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people across the world. TWOTW was first displayed on New York City's High Line, and throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic the collaborators have adapted the content to be projected onto city buildings and landscapes, including jails and courthouses – first in New York, then in Washington D.C. and Ohio. The installation's first international showing was in Mexico City in late June.
Journalism
She writes about Caribbean culture, race-related issues, music, pop culture and travel for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes Life. She also writes and produces on-air pieces for NPR’s All Things Considered. She wrote and produced the documentaries “Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop” and “Rhyme & Punishment.”
Awards and Honors
Dreisinger is the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Art for Justice grant and the 2014 Marcia Vickery-Wallace award. '''
