Derecka Purnell is obsessed with love and liberation. She seeks both in all that she does, especially as a writer, organizer, cultural worker, movement lawyer, and friend. She is the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom . She is currently working on her second book and building political homes where people can love, study, experiment, and thrive together.

She received her JD from Harvard Law School, her BA from the University of Missouri- Kansas City, and studied public policy and economics at the University of California- Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs Law Fellow. Her writing has been published widely, including inThe New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Teen Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, The Harvard Journal of African American Policy, and Cal Law Review. She has lectured, studied, and strategized on social movements across North America, Africa, Australia, and Europe. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Derecka recently completed her Scholar-in-Residence fellowship at Columbia Law School. She is a columnist at The Guardian and serves on the founding editorial board of Hammer and Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture.