Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Early life and education Ruth Wilson was born on April 2, 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut. Wilson's grandfather organised the first blue collar workers' union at Yale University. Her father, Courtland Seymour Wilson, was a tool-and-die maker for Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

Career Gilmore earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1998 in economic geography and social theory, inspired by the work of Neil Smith.

She is a cofounder of many social justice organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project. In 1998, she was one of the cofounders of Critical Resistance along with Angela Davis. In 2003, she cofounded Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) to fight jail and prison construction and currently serves on its board. She has also published work in venues such as Race & Class, The Professional Geographer, Social Justice, Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex, and the critical anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which was edited by the Incite! collective.

Awards and recognition In 2011, Gilmore was the keynote speaker at the National Women's Studies Association annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 2012, the American Studies Association awarded her its first Angela Y. Davis prize for Public Scholarship that "recognizes scholars who have applied or used their scholarship for the "public good." This includes work that explicitly aims to educate the public, influence policies, or in other ways seeks to address inequalities in imaginative, practical, and applicable forms."

In 2014, Gilmore received the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice from the Association of American Geographers.

In 2017, Gilmore earned the American Studies Association Richard A. Yarborough Award. This honors scholars who demonstrate an excellence in teaching and mentoring.

In 2020, Gilmore was listed by Prospect as the seventh-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era, with the magazine writing, "Gilmore has spent the best part of 30 years developing the field of carceral geography [...] She's helped shift the conversation about responses to crime from one of punishment to rehabilitation. As the failings of the US justice system come once again to the fore, Gilmore's radical ideas have never felt more relevant."

In 2021, Gilmore was elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2023, Gilmore was honored with a mural painted by artist and filmmaker, Jess X. Snow and local community members on the outside of the Possible Futures bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut.