Mia Mingus

Mia Mingus is a writer, educator and trainer for transformative justice and disability justice. She is a queer physically disabled korean transracial and transnational adoptee raised in the Caribbean. She works for community, interdependence and home for all of us, not just some of us, and longs for a world where disabled children can live free of violence, with dignity and love. As her work for liberation evolves and deepens, her roots remain firmly planted in ending sexual violence. Mia founded and currently leads SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project which builds the conditions for transformative justice to grow and thrive. She has been involved in transformative justice work for almost 2 decades and has supported numerous people, groups, families and communities in addressing harm, violence and abuse using transformative justice. She is an abolitionist and a survivor who believes that we must move beyond punishment, revenge and criminalization if we are ever to effectively break generational cycles of violence and create the world our hearts long for. She is passionate about building the skills, relationships and structures that can transform violence, harm and abuse within our communities and that do not rely on or replicate the punitive system we currently live in. Mia speaks and gives trainings about transformative justice throughout North America.

Mia helped to create and forward the disability justice framework. Her writings on disability have been used around the world and are a regular part of college and university curricula. Her blog, Leaving Evidence, has become a staple resource for anyone wanting to learn about disability and she has coined language and concepts such as “access intimacy,” “magnificence,” “politically and descriptively disabled” and “forced intimacy.” Mia has played a key role in connecting disability justice with other movements and communities and she has worked tirelessly to educate different communities about disability, ableism, access, disability justice and abled supremacy.

Her writings can be found on her blog, Leaving Evidence, as well as Make/Shift, Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence, Criptiques, Octavia’s Brood: Sci-Fi from Social Movements, The Wind is Spirit: A Bio/Anthology of Audre Lorde and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique, Stay Solid! A Radical Handbook for Youth, Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics, Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators.

In 2013, along with 14 other activists, Mia was recognized by the White House as an Asian and Pacific Islander women’s Champion of Change in observance of Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Mia was a 2005 New Voices Fellow, was named one of the Advocate’s 40 Under 40 in 2010, one of the 30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30 in 2009 by Angry Asian Man, one of Campus Pride’s Top 25 LGBT Favorite speakers for their 2009, 2010 and 2011 HOT LISTs, and was listed in Go Magazine’s 2013 100 Women We Love. Mia was honored with the 2008 Creating Change Award by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and a community activist award for her “dedication and steadfast activism” in 2007 by ZAMI in Atlanta, GA.