2025: Laurie Bertram Roberts
The Organizing Committee of the Ann Snitow Prize is thrilled to name Laurie Bertram Roberts its sixth annual honoree. The $12,000 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.
Roberts (she/they) is co-founder and executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund (MRFF), the state’s only abortion fund and support hub. She has also served as the regional director and national board representative for the Mid-South region of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and as president of the Mississippi chapter of NOW.
A low-income, Black, queer, and disabled grassroots activist—as well as a freelance writer, doula, prospective midwife, and mother—Roberts has been marching and agitating since her teens. She is a true intersectional feminist, whose vision combines reproductive, racial, disability, and climate justice. Her warmth, ingenuity, and effectiveness embody the spirit of the prize, Ann’s spirit.
“Laurie lives the principle of reproductive justice,” wrote journalist and activist Debbie Nathan, in her letter nominating Roberts: “that pregnant people have the basic human right to abort for whatever reason they wish, without stigma; to have children if and when they desire; to raise families in conditions of security, comfort and freedom; and to get the information and supplies they need to cultivate sexual freedom and pleasure. She demands these human rights from the state. And since the state is generally unwilling, especially when it comes to poor and Black people, MRFF steps into the breach.”
The Award Ceremony took place on Zoom on Dec. 9, 2025. It featured a conversation between Roberts and Nathan: “Reproductive injustices – and other injustices – in the Deep South.”
MRFF offers contraception, community-based sex education, parenting support, and no-strings/no-stigma pregnancy support regardless of pregnancy outcome. For Roberts, that may mean driving a pregnant person hundreds of miles to a state where abortion is legal one day, and stocking her house with extra diapers the next.
“In these dark days it’s increasingly urgent for us feminists to organize and theorize together from our communal grassroots,” Nathan adds. “In the tradition of Ann Snitow’s work to marry cutting-edge feminist practice with cutting-edge feminist theory, Roberts is a fellow pioneer.”
Work at MRFF has been “a challenging yet rewarding endeavor” since the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v Jackson, rescinded the Constitutional right to abortion, Roberts says. “It has shifted our work from direct abortion funding to primarily practical support care, alongside our mutual aid work.” Although barriers to access have increased, “people have not stopped having abortions. Our work is harder than ever and desperately needed.”
“I’m truly honored to be the 2025 recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize. I do not take it lightly that it was a friend of Ann Snitow that nominated me. That someone who knew her sees the same feminist qualities in me is profound. It is a reminder that you never know who is watching the work you are doing, and to keep going.”
— 2025 winner Laurie Bertram Roberts
Roberts was selected by judges Amanda Berger, Shatema Threadcraft, Kareem Khubchandani, and Nathan (who, as Roberts’ nominator, recused herself from that part of the judging).
2024: Margaret Prescod
“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 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.
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.
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.