Education:
B.A. - 2010, Dartmouth College
J.D. - 2018, Yale Law School
Chrysanthemum is a Baltimore-based attorney who formerly served as a juvenile public defender in Baltimore City. She provides civil and administrative legal representation to Marylanders through various legal projects and pro bono work, including rent court representation for LGBTQ people and organizations, post-conviction work for incarcerated transgender people, and advocacy related to the collateral consequences of incarceration. Chrysanthemum came to Baltimore as a Justice Catalyst Fellow at FreeState Justice providing civil representation to LGBTQ Marylanders with a specific focus on incarcerated people and system-involved trans youth.
Chrysanthemum graduated from Yale Law School in 2018 and was in the Criminal Defense, Juvenile Defense and Re-entry clinics. She was involved in several legal education projects including co-directing and teaching in the Marshall-Brennan Project, co-founding a tutoring program that brought law students into a low-income elementary school to work one on one with students, and co-creating a Know Your Rights program using a “train the trainers” model through the Black Law Students Association. Prior to law school, she spent several years working in the New Haven Public School system.
Chrysanthemum co-taught a clinical seminar, Intervening in the Criminalization of Youth and Queer and Trans Individuals at Yale Law School prior to joining the University of Baltimore Law School faculty. Her research interests include criminal defense pedagogy, political epistemology, LGBTQ criminal justice issues with a focus on youth, and police violence.