Kristen Hamel is the Green Party candidate on the Stop the War Slate for State Representative from the 1st District, which encompasses northeast Detroit, Harper Woods, and the Grosse Pointes.  Hamel is a lifelong Michiganian and a resident of East English Village on Detroit's east side for the last 15 years.  She is an anti-war and social justice activist and was Workers World Party's candidate for the same office in 1996.

     Hamel brings years of experience in many progressive struggles to her campaign.  She is a legal assistant by trade and a former union activist in the UAW and Newspaper Guild of Detroit.

     While a worker at the Detroit Free Press in the mid-1980s, she was a leader in the struggle to stop the joint operating merger between the Free Press and the Detroit News.  After years of struggle inside and outside the courts, the merger was finally approved by the federal government in 1989.  It caused, as Hamel had predicted, mass layoffs and further attacks on the newspaper unions.

     In 1996 she was arrested during the bitter Detroit Newspaper Strike for blocking gates at the Detroit Free Press and was on the picket lines time and time again supporting the workers.

     Kristen Hamel has organized and marched against racism and imperialist wars; for lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender rights; for women's and workers' rights; in support of revolutionary Cuba, which she visited in 2005; and many other struggles. 

     She is a founder and leading organizer of the Detroit Action Network For Reproductive Rights (DANFORR).  Hamel has been a member of Workers World Party for the past 24 years.