Meet Keeonna Harris

We welcome Keeonna as our guest editor for Jelly Bucket #15’s special section: Incarcerated Voices

Keeonna Harris (she/her) is a memoirist, creative nonfiction writer, and abolitionist scholar. Keeonna was born and raised in Watts, and other parts of South-Central Los Angeles, California. In her writing, Keeonna explores conceptions of motherhood, familial relationships, and wellbeing for Black women in the United States—focusing on the health disparities, relationships, and radical organizing for women connected to systems of mass incarceration. Keeonna's debut memoir Mainline Mama will be published with Amistad Press in 2025. She has written for Salon.com and has a chapter in the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth edited by Aracelis Girmay (Haymarket Books, 2023) and an interview in "(Super)vision: On Motherhood and Surveillance" edited by Sophie Hamcher (Orbis, 2023). Keeonna is an inaugural recipient of the 2018-2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and the 2024-2025 Haymarket Writing for Freedom Fellowship. She also received the 2021 Tin House Summer Writing Residency, the 2023 Baldwin Center for the Arts Residency, a 2023 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence and the 2023 Edith Wharton Resident. Keeonna worked as a chef for Hedgebrook in Seattle, Washington. Keeonna received her PhD from Arizona State University in 2021 and is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington.