Raquel Willis

ACTIVIST. AUTHOR. MEDIA STRATEGIST.

Credit: Texas Isaiah

Raquel Willis is an award-winning activist, journalist, and media strategist dedicated to collective liberation, especially for Black trans folks. She is a co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement and an executive producer with iHeartMedia’s first-ever LGBTQ+ podcast network, Outspoken. Raquel hosts two podcast series: Afterlives and Queer Chronicles. She is also the author of The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation.

Raquel has held groundbreaking posts, including director of communications for Ms. Foundation for Women, executive editor of Out magazine, and national organizer for Transgender Law Center. She co-founded Transgender Week of Visibility and Action with civil rights attorney Chase Strangio. She is the president of the Solutions Not Punishments Collaborative’s executive board and serves on the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art board.

She published the GLAAD Media Award-winning “Trans Obituaries Project,” in 2022, she executive-produced and hosted “The Trans Youth Town Hall” with Logo. The work was nominated for the GLAAD Awards and won Gold distinction in the Shorty Awards. She was also honored as a 2023 ADCOLOR Advocate.

Her writing has been published in Black Futures by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, Bulgari Magnifica: The Power Women Hold edited by Tina Leung, The Echoing Ida Collection edited by Kemi Alabi, Cynthia R. Greenlee, and Janna A. Zinzi, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha Blain. She has also written for Essence, Bitch, VICE, Buzzfeed, The Cut, and Vogue.

Raquel is a thought leader on gender, race, and intersectionality. She’s experienced in online publications, organizing marginalized communities for social change, non-profit media strategy, and public speaking while using digital activism as a major tool of resistance and liberation.

Born and raised in Augusta, GA, Raquel has a loving mother and siblings who affirm and support her. She is also the youngest child in her family and an auntie to a host of nibblings. She credits the passing of her late father as the catalyst for her transition and career.

Raquel has always believed in the power of storytelling. After graduating with a B.A. in magazine journalism and a minor in gender studies from the University of Georgia in 2013, she began her career as a news reporter at the Walton Tribune in Monroe, GA. She quickly took her storytelling, writing, and advocacy talents to the digital world and began uplifting grassroots organizing efforts in Atlanta, GA. She worked on behalf of the Solutions Not Punishments Collaborative to end police profiling of transgender women of color and mass incarceration. She worked with others on a campaign to implement a pre-arrest diversion program in Atlanta.

She also successfully led the Atlanta Trans Liberation Tuesday mobilization with the larger Black Lives Matter network. Her dedication to trans advocacy opened the door to her work at TLC in Oakland, CA.

Her writing has been featured in Essence, Bitch magazine, VICE, Buzzfeed, Autostraddle, ForHarriet, HuffPost, The Cut, and Vogue.

In January 2017, she was a speaker at the National Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and discussed the necessary inclusion of women and people on the margins in social justice movements.

Further, Raquel was in the pilot cohort of Channel Black, a media organizing and training arm of the Movement for Black Lives. She was also the final host of Black Girl Dangerous Media's BGD Podcast, discussing pop culture and current events from an intersectional lens. She was also a member of the 2017 Sojourner Truth Leadership Circle through Auburn Seminary. She also joined Echoing Ida, a national Black women, and nonbinary writers' collective.

In 2018, Raquel was named an Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellow through which she developed Black Trans Circles, a project of TLC, focused on developing the leadership of Black trans women in the South and Midwest by creating healing justice spaces to work through oppression-based trauma and incubating community organizing efforts to address anti-trans murder and violence. She was also awarded the Emerging Leader Award by the San Francisco Transgender Day of Visibility Committee. She was named to the Frederick Douglass 200, a list of people who best embody the spirit and work of Frederick Douglass, for her influence as a public feminist. That year, she was named a Jack Jones Literary Arts Sylvia Rivera Fellow.

During her time at Out, she published the “Trans Obituaries Project” to highlight the epidemic of violence against trans women of color. She developed a community-sourced 13-point framework to end the epidemic. This project won a GLAAD Media Award.

Raquel also uses her platform to fundraise for Black-led LGBTQ+ initiatives and has previously served on advisory boards for Borealis Philanthropy's Fund for Trans Generations and the Roddenberry Foundation.

 

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

2017

2018

  • them magazine’s Queeroes Award

2019

2020

2021

2022

  • The National Association of Black Journalists LGBTQ Task Force’s Visibility Award

  • Person of the Year by The Advocate

2023