Laura McTighe has been working as an organizer, communications strategist, and writer on issues at the intersection of HIV/AIDS, prisons, and gender for more than fifteen years. Since 2008, her work has been centered in the American South at Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans. She served as a core campaign strategist and communications director for WWAV’s NO Justice Project, an internationally renowned campaign to end the criminalization of sex work through Louisiana’s 205-year-old crime against nature statute, which resulted in a federal judicial ruling in April 2012 and the removal of more than 700 women from the sex offender registry. In the summer of 2013, she launched an oral history project to document the lives and stories of the people who have guided WWAV over the last two decades, which is tentatively titled “Born in Flames” in memory of the aggravated arson attack on WWAV’s offices in May 2012.

Laura is PhD candidate in Religion at Columbia University, and holds an M.T.S. in Islamic Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. in Religion from Haverford College. Her writings have been published in Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012) and a variety of community publications.