User:Rmaxmiller/Jackie Wang

Lead
Jackie Wang is an American professor, author, and poet. She is best known for her books Carceral Capitalism, which critiques the relationship between the debt economy and racialized mass incarceration, and The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void, for which she was a National Book Award finalist in poetry in 2021. Her scholarship centers on the intersections of racism, liberal capitalism, surveillance technologies, and the political economy of prisons.

Early Life and Education
Jackie Wang grew up in New Port Richey, Florida. Her brother was incarcerated when she was 16. While in Florida she worked a number of minimum wage jobs, including as a hotel receptionist, and during this time Wang witnessed firsthand the class divisions in Florida which had been heavily exacerbated by the 2008 housing market crash.

Wang received a B.A. in Liberal arts from the New College of Florida in 2010, a school she chose in order to avoid debt. Later, Wang completed both an M.A. and Ph.D. in African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2018 and 2020 respectively. Her Ph.D. advisor was Elizabeth Hinton.