Congratulations to Andrew Kornfeld, winner of the Percival W. Clement Prize and the Theron Rockwell Field Prize! The Clement Prize is an American Studies prize awarded for the best senior thesis in support of the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the first ten amendments, while the university-wide Field Prize is given for a “poetic, literary, or religious work,” including creative writing or scholarship. Andrew’s thesis, “The Promise of Self-Defense: Inez García, Joan Little, and the Rape Politics of the Prison,” examines the links between state and sexual violence by looking at the stories of two women of color who were criminalized for killing the men who raped them in the 1970s. Andrew’s thesis confronts the prison as a racializing and gender-making institution that operations to maintain America’s racist-sexist social order in which rape has been naturalized. By centering the ways Inez García and Joan Little resisted both their rape and their criminalization, Andrew’s thesis upholds self-defense as the starting point of abolitionist feminist liberation.