Red Emma’s

Tracing the long and ongoing historical geography of Black freedom struggles in the face of anti-Black police violence in these communities, Winston shows how marronage provides critical lessons for reimagining public safety and community well-being. These freedom struggles take place in what Winston calls maroon geographies—sites of flight from slavery and the spaces of freedom produced in multigenerational Black communities. Maroon geographies constitute part of a Black placemaking tradition that asserts life-affirming forms of community. Winston contends that maroon geographies operate as a central method of Black flight, holding ground, and constructing places of freedom in ways that imagine and plan a world beyond policing.

“With its rich account of marronage in Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond, Celeste Winston’s How to Lose the Hounds _is a brilliant addition to the study of black flight, geographic transformations, and abolition. _How to Lose the Hounds both succeeds as a rigorous study of maroon geographies, maroon justice and other maroon tactics and, importantly, insists that a careful understanding of ‘radical Black praxis of community’ is essential to the work toward police abolition.” — Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

Celeste Winston is Assistant Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. Her research explores spatially interconnected struggles around structural racial, economic, and gender violence. Her work aims to generate evidence of and for more livable and equitable geographies. She uses critical qualitative and mapping methods—often in collaboration with community organizations and leaders. She received a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences in 2019 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a former fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World" (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). Most recently, Johnson signed a two book deal with the Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, to publish a non-fiction monograph examining Black women's engagement with history of slavery and how that engagement appears and reappears in digital and social media; and a history of Black researchers and the first generation of Black people freed from slavery in the United States. Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist. Johnson is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is PI of Black Beyond Data, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab, with co-PIs Kim Gallon and Alexandre White. Alongside Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa, Johnson also co-directs the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship. Johnson's essay, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads" is widely recognized as a ground-breaking intervention in the fields of Black studies, digital humanities and data science.