Join local organizer Melissa Tanis and author Kristi D. Osorio for a panel discussion addressing the realities and harms of true crime media on survivors of crime and families who have been impacted by the criminal justice system. Topics will include the direct effect of true crime on Tanis and Osorio’s own families, as well as how the true crime industry perpetuates myths around crime, safety, punishment, and whose stories “deserve” to be told.

Osorio’s new book, “The Sound of Burning: A Mother, a Daughter, a Murder” ,combines memoir and cultural critique to tell a story of coming of age after her mother murdered her grandmother in the home they shared when Osorio was a teen. Tanis, who reconnected with her incarcerated father after watching a documentary he was in, will share about her own experience of filming for a follow-up documentary, the ups and downs of publicly sharing her story, and how media can both repair and harm those impacted by incarceration. Both Tanis and Osorio will bring nuance, lived experience, and abolitionist values to a conversation that often mimics the black-and-white thinking promoted by the true crime industry and the carceral state.

Please register in advance.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Kristi D. Osorio is the author of the memoir The Sound of Burning: a Mother, a Daughter, a Murder (University of Georgia Press, 2026). In 2023, she won the Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Sonora Review “Mercy” Contest in Nonfiction. She has served communities affected by the criminal justice system through writing, teaching, and advocacy at Rikers Island, Columbia School of Social Work’s Beyond the Bars, and the Vera Institute of Justice. She teaches at Texas Tech University.

Melissa Tanis is a community organizer and abolitionist. She advocates both on a policy and personal level for people to be freed from prison. She also organizes for tenant power in her building and her neighborhood. She believes in collective liberation, skill sharing, mutual aid, and building the conditions now of the world we want to live in.