2024: Margaret Prescod
The Organizing Committee of the Ann Snitow Prize is thrilled to name Margaret Prescod its fifth annual honoree. The $12,500 award recognizes a feminist of outstanding vision, originality, generosity, and effectiveness, whose work combines intellectual and/or artistic pursuits with feminist and social justice activism.
Prescod is a lifelong organizer whose feminist, anti-racist, and anti-poverty campaigns have centered the work of caregivers all over the globe. She is an undersung movement hero and a founder, co-founder, or member of countless groups campaigning for equality and justice—an embodiment of the values of collaboration, inspiration, and efficacy recognized by the Prize.
The 2024 Award Ceremony took place on Zoom on December 10, 2024. Prescod, joined by 2023 winner Shariana Ferrer-Núñez, discussed the importance of grassroots feminism in authoritarian times.
Prescod’s campaigns have been local, national and international, spanning welfare rights; a guaranteed care income/living wage for all workers, including mothers and other unwaged care workers; a permanent child benefit; support for grassroots organizers for justice in Haiti, Palestine, and Myanmar; and movements against war and occupation. She is a cofounder of International Black Women for Wages for Housework; a coordinator of Women of Color/Global Women’s Strike; and a founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network, Give Us Back Our Children, and Reclaiming Our Sisters Everywhere. She is also the host of the nationally syndicated radio show “Sojourner Truth” and the author of Black Women: Bringing it All Back Home.
“For me, the Ann Snitow Prize is a reminder to be steadfast in what one does, to stay true to one’s principles and to be accountable to those with the least in society, as well as those who advocate on our behalf. One never knows who recognizes the value of this work for truth and justice and/or who is paying attention. This prize is a reminder that no matter how difficult the challenges, there are those who strive to uplift, offer hope, joy, and beauty.”
— 2024 winner Margaret Prescod
Prescod was selected by judges Hannah Dickinson, Liza Featherstone, Vicki Hsueh, and Rose Owen. She was nominated by University of Wisconsin historian Emily Calacci, who celebrates Prescod’s feminism as “grounded in the everyday struggles of women, and at the same, breathtakingly ambitious.”
“By starting from women’s unpaid labor and the ways that racial capitalism extracts wealth from all of us,” Calacci says, “Prescod shows us what we have in common, and what we stand to gain by joining together, rather than allowing ourselves to be divided. As we face the rise of a global far-right movement that seeks to explain economic dispossession by mobilizing xenophobia, racism and misogyny, what we need is a feminism that can explain our collective predicament and offer a broad basis for organizing against it. Margaret Prescod’s work has never been more urgent.”
2023: Shariana Ferrer-Núñez
“I am deeply grateful and honored to be the 2023 recipient of the Ann Snitow Award. What makes this award even more special and significant was the fact that I was nominated by my compañeras and comrades of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción. This is a recognition of the political, grassroots, and radical thought possible through collective engagement. It comes with a responsibility to continue the struggle toward liberation, to nurture critical thinking and combative scholarship, and to make it accessible to all.”
— 2023 Winner Shariana Ferrer-Núñez
Shariana Ferrer-Núñez is a Caribbean Black feminist and queer organizer based in Puerto Rico. In addition to being a cofounder of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, she is one of the coordinators of the Escuela Feminista Radical (ESFRA). Her political practice seeks to dismantle systems of oppression while creating other forms of social and communal life. She is the co-author of Nosotras Contra la Deuda with Zoán Dávila Roldán.
As the cofounder and spokesperson for La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a grassroots Black feminist decolonial organization founded in 2014, Shariana has played a leading role in the movements against austerity, racism, sexism, and colonial subjugation in Puerto Rico. In her energy, leadership, and vision for collective liberation and joy, she beautifully embodies the spirit and values of the Prize.
2022: Mariame Kaba
“I am incredibly honored to have been nominated for and to actually be awarded with the Ann Snitow Prize,” says Kaba. “Like Ann, I believe that feminism is ever evolving and changing, which means that there’s room for constant experimentation and also for fun. I hope to continue to push forward in her legacy.”
— 2022 Winner Mariame Kaba
Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She is a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, the Chicago Freedom School, Survived and Punished, and most recently Sojourners for Justice Press, a Black feminist abolitionist micro-press. She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea J. Ritchie.
2021: Sarah Schulman
“Because we live in a time where perfection and smooth lack of difference are broadly demanded, I never thought I could be the recipient of this prize. I have had differences of opinion with half of the judges, while also cooperating with them. For those long, true histories of parallel, crossing, overlapping work for justice, this means so much to me. It feels so deep to be recognized by my real peers. It is reassuring, and even more—it is moving.”
— 2021 Winner Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman is a writer, scholar, and activist whose prolific body of work across mediums—fiction, nonfiction, theater, and film—attests to a lifetime of creativity and dedication to queer, left, and feminist causes. She is the author of nineteen books, most recently Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT-UP New York, 1987-1993 (2021), which has been praised as “remarkable,” “amazing,” and “definitive”; in the words of one reviewer, “a resounding rebuttal to exclusionary versions of AIDS history.” Sarah’s nominator, Susan Stryker, the groundbreaking historian and leader in trans theory and activism, calls the book “the capstone of Schulman’s decades of activism on AIDS-related issues.”
Schulman was selected by judges Kaavya Asoka, Liat Ben-Moshe, Karma Chavez, Sarah Leonard, Premilla Nadasen, and Barbara Ransby. Nadasen, the winner of the inaugural Ann Snitow Prize, notes that Schulman’s “fierce courage in tackling difficult issues, and her unwavering commitment to not only theorize but to help build a more just society—in the U.S. and abroad—embody the essence of the Ann Snitow Prize.” Fellow judge Chavez adds: “Schulman’s longstanding and diverse feminist and queer activism on issues ranging from HIV/AIDS to the sexism of the literary world to gentrification to Palestine made her a truly ideal candidate. In particular, the importance of her recent book, Let the Record Show, as a handbook for activists facing government inaction and pandemic politics made her an ideal choice in this historical moment.”
2020: Premilla Nadasen
“I am deeply humbled to be the inaugural recipient of this prize in honor of pioneering feminist Ann Snitow. It is a recognition of the many poor and working-class women of color who fought for economic justice, racial equality, and feminism who mobilized to make their political voice heard. Through their activism, they cultivated a feminist politics that is even more urgent today.”
—2020 Winner Premilla Nadasen
A woman of African and Indian ancestry, Nadasen grew up in South Africa and moved to the US as a child. She became an activist in high school and joined the student anti-apartheid movement at college in the 1980s. As an activist, historian, and pedagogue—she now teaches at Barnard College—Nadasen lifts up often invisible working women and women’s social justice movements, grassroots multi-issue organizing by low-income Southern women, and the vibrant labor organizing among domestic workers, a force made up largely of women of color and immigrants. Bringing together the politics of care, global migration. labor, race, and poverty under a feminist rubric, Nadasen discovers new points of intersection, broadening and deepening both the definitions and possibilities of feminism.
In an extraordinary year—marked by continued police killings of Black people and massive Black Lives Matter protests, increased attacks on democracy and reproductive justice, and a pandemic that manifested America’s and the world’s deep historic, racialized health and economic inequalities and the centrality of care in all our lives—we were proud to honor Premilla with the inaugural Ann Snitow Prize.