A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She teaches law at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and subsequently directed the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor.  She won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship. Alexander is a former law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, and has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.