Wes Ware is the founder and Director of BreakOUT!, an organization dedicated to fighting the criminalization of LGBTQ youth in New Orleans, LA, and is a 2011 Soros U.S. Justice Fellowship recipient. As the LGBTQ Project Director at the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, he authored the report "Locked Up & Out" and helped implement a model LGBTQ policy at the local juvenile detention center. His essay, “’Rounding Up The Homosexuals’: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender Non-conforming Youth” is published in the anthology, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. A native Southerner, he firmly believes in the power of LGBTQ youth in the Deep South to achieve gender self-determination and liberation for all of us.