About the Author

Joshua Aiken is the author of the award-winning chapbook “to be in and of” (Palette Poetry, 2023) selected as the winner of the 2022 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize by poet Chen Chen. In April 2023, the de Groot Foundation named him a 2023 “Courage to Write” Writer of Note. 

A Cave Canem Fellow and winner of the Martin Starkie Prize, his poetry can be found in publications like Apogee, Assaracus, BOAAT, Boulevard Magazine, Copper Nickel, Green Mountains Review, The Indianapolis Review, Muzzle Magazine, Pleaides: Literature in Context and Sixth Finch. Joshua is currently a J.D./Ph.D. Candidate in History and African-American Studies at Yale where his research focuses on the relationship between the regulation of firearms in the United States, state-sanctioned violence, and racial hierarchy since the Reconstruction Era. Specifically, his work observes the distribution of harm that underwrites American social life and how–beyond the Second Amendment–constitutional law, criminal procedure, and legal liberalism have provided for a racial jurisprudence of firearms. His research more broadly with 20^th-century histories of how violence sanctioned and facilitated by “equal justice under law” has shaped and been shaped by racial capitalism, settler empire, and anti-blackness. He is interested in how race, gender, sexuality and ability relate to legalized notions of danger, safety, criminality, depravity and deviance. His areas of legal focus are race and the law (including critical race theory), prison law, criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, and administrative law (namely regulations that target LGBTQ+ communities). 

Joshua received the 2020 Esposito Memorial Scholarship from the Point Foundation which continues to support his academic work. Joshua was the 2022-2023 Research Affiliate at the Duke Center on Firearms Law. In support of his research on guns, race, and violence in American social life was recently named a 2023-2024 Grantee by the Harvard Injury Control and Research Center with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

Joshua is the former Policy Fellow at the Prison Policy Initiative and received graduate degrees from the University of Oxford in History and Forced Migration Studies where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar (Missouri & Pembroke 2014). His research on the criminal legal system has been featured in The New York Times, he has presented his research on gender and gun laws in the Reconstruction South at the American Studies Association Conference, and written about blackness and captivity in Transgender Studies Quarterly. He is the former co-convenor of the Racial Capitalism and the Carceral State Working Group and in 2020 served as the Researcher-in-Residence at Artspace New Haven for their exhibition on the New Haven Black Panther Party for Self-Defense entitled “Revolution on Trial.”