Shaka Senghor

Shaka Senghor is a writer, mentor and motivational speaker who transformed his life and discovered his love for writing while serving nineteen years in prison, time he spent examining his life and the decisions that led him to spend his youth in a 6′ x 8′ cell. By sharing his story, Shaka has inspired mothers of murder victims to forgive, inspired young men in the streets to choose a college degree over a prison number, and shifted the thinking of tough-on-crime advocates from the lock-‘em-up-throw-away-the-key mentality to believing redemption is possible. Shaka currently serves as the Director of Strategy for #cut50, a national bipartisan initiative to safely and smartly reduce our incarcerated population. He is also founder of the Atonement Project, a recipient of the 2012 Black Male Engagement (BMe) Leadership Award, a 2013 MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, a Fellow in the inaugural class of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Leadership Network, and teaches a course on the Atonement Project at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2014, Shaka shared his story on the world-renowned TED stage and in just four months his talk reached more than 1,000,000 views.