Public Writing & Speaking

Baltimore Sun – High incarceration may be more harmful than high crime

The Conversation – Charging media for using police-shooting video may be the price of equal justice

The Marshall Project – The Missed Opportunity of Robert Woodson: One conservative black activist’s campaign for community crime control

Slate – Protest Is Democracy at Work: We should be grateful for people who take to the streets

The Boston Review – “The Only Government I Know”

Balkinization – The Missing Lesson of Ferguson: Conduct ≠ Contact

Yale Daily News – MATOS & WEAVER: Recognize, revalue and rid

Yale Alumni Magazine – The Next Four Years

On Ferguson in Theory & Event – Black Citizenship and Summary Punishment: A Brief History to the Present

“Uncovering Inequality” at Columbia University
“The Idea of Prison Abolition” at The Hutchins Center
“Racism and Anti-Racism in Contemporary America: The Criminal Justice System” at The University of Pennsylvania
“Black Middle Class Not Equivalent to White Middle Class” at the Brookings Institution
“Grassroots Narratives of Policing in the “Low End”, Downtown Baltimore, South L.A., and the 53206” at Oxford University
“Portals: Conversations About the Police by the Policed” at Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights
“Harvard’s Five Big Ideas in Inequality” series
“Police Violence in Comparative Perspective”
at Columbia University
“Race & the Criminal Justice System: Where do we go from here?”
“Democracy 20/20- Already Authorian? Violence, Policing, and Democracy”
“Racial Justice, Policing, and Protest”
Annual Reviews Shot of Science
Politics and Prose Live! Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson |
Let Them Eat Tweets
Prison Rebellion and Prison Reform panel, UVA Law
Keynote Discussing Portals
at Brown University
The Incarceration Crisis that Threatens Democracy (2018 Dinkins Forum, Columbia University)
Beyond the Ballot Box: A Conversation About Democracy and Policing in the United States
Black Lives Matter, Police, and America’s Democracy
WYPR’s On The Record with Sheilah Kast

Opening remarks for DC Dox film festival at Hopkins Bloomberg Center for Alabama Solution film (2025)

Panelist, Stories that Matter screening of Daughters film at Hopkins Bloomberg Center (2025)

The Artist’s Voice: Titus Kaphar in Conversation with Mika’il DeVeaux, Tina Reynolds and Vesla Mae Weaver – Thursday, February 26, 2015 // 7:00 PM  9:00 PM // The Studio Museum in Harlem144 W 125th St New York, NY, 10027

PBS/American Experience documentary, The Riot Report, aired on PBS in 2024

Keynote address, The University at Albany’s Michael J. Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center, 22nd Annual Lecture (2024)

Andrew Ross, Tomasso Bardelli, and Aiyuba Thomas book Abolition Labor at Red Emma’s Bookstore – in conversation with Vesla Weaver (2024)

JHU Magazine, “Writing Within Prison Walls” (2024)

Baltimore Magazine, “The American Prison Writing Archive Moves to Baltimore” (January 2024)

New York Times, “For the American Prison Writing Archive, a ‘Shadow Canon’ Sheds Light” (Arts Section feature article), 2023

Johns Hopkins University, Arts and Sciences Magazine, “Justice For All?” (Spring 2023) WYPR “On The Record” broadcast, “Bearing witness to incarceration,” (April 2023)

Financial Times, Behind the Money podcast, “A history of police funding” (2020)

Pacific Standard, “Millennials Are More Likely to Face Arrest Than Gen X’ers” (2019)

Major coverage in the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, USA Today, Time Magazine, Vox, New York Times (on policing and the fate of the republic and Amanda Taub’s The Interpreter and Jamelle Bouie’s articles, “Where Democracy Isn’t Very Democratic” and “We Construct and Reconstruct Race”),The Marshall Project, The New Republic, The Chicago Tribune, The Chronicle of Higher Education,  The Gothamist, the Urban Institute, and the Center for American Progress.

Mosaic by Britt Weaver