Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prison scholar and abolitionist activist. She is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York.Gilmore has been credited with inventing carceral geography, the “study of the interrelationships across space, institutions and political economy that shape and define modern incarceration”. She received the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Geographers.Gilmore's first book, "Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California," was published in 2007.Gilmore received her B.A. in Drama from Yale University and her Ph.D. in Economic Geography and Social Theory from Rutgers University.