Liza Jessie Peterson

Liza Jessie Peterson has worked with incarcerated youth — both male and female — in various capacities for twenty years as a teaching artist, poet-in-residence, NYC Board of Education full-time GED teacher, re-entry specialist, outreach coordinator, and most recently as a program counselor with the NYC Department of Corrections. She appeared on two seasons of HBO’s groundbreaking Def Poetry and was featured in Ava Duvernay’s critically acclaimed film The 13th. Her one-woman stage play, The Peculiar Patriot, toured in more than thirty-five penitentiaries across the country and the full production premiered in New York at the National Black Theater in 2017 and received an Agnes Gund Art for Justice Fund grant. Liza is a writer, actress, speaker who lives in Brooklyn.