Rate My Professor Mike Lyons

Lyons' research and creative work centers on storytelling and civic media, with a particular emphasis on narratives of crime and incarceration. In 2015, he co-founded The Redemption Project alongside Abd'Allah Lateef, John Pace, and Kempis Songster to bring the voices of incarcerated individuals across prison walls in support of criminal justice reform. He also established West Philly Local in 2010, a community journalism site named Philadelphia’s best community news site by Philadelphia Weekly. His peer-reviewed publications include “There’s Urgency Here: A Pedagogy of Discomfort in a Prison Basement” co-authored with Felix Rosado in PUBLIC: The Journal of Imagining America (Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring 2019), “An Army Like That of Gideon: Transnational Reform on the Pages of Free Russia” in American Journalism (32.1, 2015), and “Diffusing Dissent: The Montgomery Story comic and civil disobedience” in Journalism History (summer 2015). Lyons has delivered numerous refereed and invited presentations on topics such as oral histories from prisons, multimedia redemption narratives of juvenile lifers, and civic media pedagogy at conferences including the Oral History Association, International Communication Association, and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He authored an op-ed, “I know the ‘murderers’ from Oz’s ads. They are no menace to society,” in The Philadelphia Inquirer (November 3, 2022).