Haymarket Books Live is a regular online series of urgent political discussions, book launches, organizer roundtables, poetry jams, and more, hosted by Haymarket Books. The podcast features recordings of our livestreamed video event series. Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago.
Join us for a wide-ranging discussion of climate catastrophe and the challenges in confronting the state and market behind the disaster. Climate catastrophe is intensifying at an alarming pace. Capital and governments clearly have no intention of stopping it; for them, free markets, private property rights, and accumulation remain sacrosanct, even if that means a massive amount of death, suffering, and destruction. Meanwhile, despite occasional moments of mass militancy in the face of ecological crisis, movements for climate justice remain far from being able to mount serious opposition to the power of the state and capital. The challenge is significant, even epochal, and we are so far unable to meet it. Join David Camfield, Sabrina Fernandes, and Richard Seymour – three socialists who have written about climate justice – for a wide-ranging discussion of this predicament and how we might overcome it. Get a copy of Future on Fire: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1263 Get a copy of The Disenchanted Earth: https://theindigopress.com/product/the-disenchanted-earth-paperback/ David Camfield is the author most recenttly of Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change. David lives in Winnipeg, has been an active socialist since high school, and is one of the editors of Midnight Sun. Richard Seymour is a writer and a founding editor of Salvage. His recent books include The Twittering Machine and The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism. Sabrina Fernandes is a sociologist, ecosocialist organizer and communicator from Brazil. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with CALAS at the University of Guadalajara. Moderator: Daniel Sarah Karasik (they/them) is the managing editor of Midnight Sun, a magazine of socialist strategy, analysis, and culture. Their most recent book is the poetry collection Plenitude (Book*hug Press). They live in Toronto. This event is sponsored by the Midnight Sun Magazine and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/VZ8LRtdeDZg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join authors of Whiteout and Robin D.G. Kelley for a discussion of the roots of the surprisingly white opioid crisis in racial capitalism. In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair. Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capitalism is toxic for all Americans. In this special event hosted by Haymarket, Robin D.G. Kelley will discuss with the authors Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg how Whiteness drove the opioid crisis. ———————————————————————————————————————————————— Get a copy of Whiteout from Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978052038... ———————————————————————————————————————————————— Panelists: Helena Hansen, an MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is the interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and interim director of the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. She is the author of Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries (UC Press 2018) and is editor of Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine: a Case Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health (Springer 2019). Julie “Jules” Netherland, PhD, is the managing director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance. Netherland previously worked in DPA's New York Policy Office where she was instrumental in passing New York's first medical marijuana laws. She is the editor of Critical Perspectives on Addiction (Emerald Press, 2012). David Herzberg is Professor of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He researches the history of drugs and drug policy in America with a focus on pharmaceuticals. He is the author of two books: White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America and Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac. He is also co-editor of Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the journal of the Alcohol and Drug History Society. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/dDr0kA6XmMo Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks This event is sponsored by the Drug Policy Alliance, Boston Review, University of California Press, University at Buffalo (SUNY) and Haymarket Books.
Join this discussion on recent developments in the fight for Palestinian liberation and where they fit in the context of settler colonialism Israel is currently undergoing unprecedent intra-Jewish social and political convulsion in light of polices propagated by the ultra-religious-nationalist government coalition now in power. The latter also pushes forward intensified assaults against Palestinians by the Occupation army and settler movement, captured most starkly in the Huwara pogrom. Palestinian resistance also appears to be entering a new era as an-intifada-like movement against Israeli targets unfolds across the West Bank, led by new Palestinian political actors. These developments take place on the backdrop of shifting regional and global dynamics that include the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Arab-Israel normalization deals, and the rise of a multipolar global order . How should we make sense of the current situation, and what do these changes mean for the struggle for a free Palestine today? Speakers: Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. He works on settler colonialism, Zionism, labour movements, and antisemitism. He is a member of the editorial boards of Notes from Below and Historical Materialism. He is the author of Settler Colonialism: An Introduction Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian academic and the author of Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territories. He currently directs the Council for British Research in the Levant's Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem and has worked in various capacities across the OPT as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/i9rKk7EqvIU Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join leading international relations experts Gilbert Achcar and Ilya Budraitskis to discuss Achcar's latest book, The New Cold War. Join leading international relations experts Gilbert Achcar and Ilya Budraitskis as the discuss Achcar's latest book The New Cold War: The United States, Russia, and China from Kosovo to Ukraine. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, warnings of a new Cold War proliferated. In fact, the New Cold War has been ongoing since the late 1990s. Racing to solidify its position as the last remaining superpower, the US alienated Russia and China, pushing them closer and rebooting the ‘old' Cold War with disastrous implications. Vladimir Putin's consequent rise and imperialist reinvention, along with Xi Jinping's own ascendancy and increasingly autocratic tendencies, would culminate, respectively, in the invasion of Ukraine and mounting tensions over Taiwan and trade. Was all this inevitable? What comes after Ukraine, and what might the contours of a more peaceful world look like? These questions and others will be discussed in the launch of The New Cold War. Buy the book from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2053-the-new-cold-war ———————————————————————————————————————————————— Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His many books include: The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (2002, 2006); Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky (2007, 2008); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010); Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (2013); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013, 2022); and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016). Ilya Budraitskis is a political and social theorist, previously based in Moscow. Since 2023 he has been a visiting scholar at Berkeley UC. He writes regularly for openDemocracy, Republic.ru, Colta.ru and other outlets. Budraitskis's essay collection Dissidents among Dissidents. Ideology, politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia was published by Verso in 2022. Budraitskis is a member of editorial board of Moscow Art Magazine, Posle.media and Executive committee of Moscow Sakharov Center. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/2qf-u9f83II Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Haymarket Books and Souls for a discussion of the campaign to free Mutulu Shakur. This panel will examine the legacy of Dr. Mutulu Shakur and what this current generation of activists can learn and apply from his political history as an activist, health worker, and political prisoner. What does the experience to win his release have to teach us about remaining COINTELPRO-era political prisoners and contemporary BLM-generation activists? Speakers: Rukia Lumumba is the Executive Director of the People's Advocacy Institute, co-coordinator of the Electoral Justice Project, and campaign co-coordinator of the successful Committee to Elect Chokwe Antar Lumumba for Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Jomo Muhammad is an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement & New Afrikan People's Organization. Monifa Bandele is a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Movement for Black Lives. Robin D.G. Kelley (moderator) is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/x4-m0J3_oLw Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Stock markets and banks are teetering on the edge. Join Spectre live to discuss the meaning of the banking crisis and state bailouts. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank followed by runs on First Republic Bank and Credit Suisse triggered panic in financial and stock markets throughout the world. Just as they did in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the U.S. and other states bailed the banks out. Where is this banking crisis headed? What does it mean for the real economy? Join Hadas Thier, David McNally, and Michael Roberts to address these and other questions about capitalism and its global slump. Speakers: David McNally is the author of Global Slump and Blood and Money. Michael Roberts is the author of The Long Depression and Capitalism in the 21st Century. This event is sponsored by Spectre Journal and Haymarket Books.
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The sixth discussion features actor and filmmaker Danielle Deadwyler. Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars. Speakers: Danielle Deadwyler is an American born multidisciplinary performance artist, filmmaker, and actor. She starred as Mamie Till Bradley in the MGM/Orion Pictures feature TILL for visionary director Chinonye Chukwu. She has starred in Netflix's limited series FROM SCRATCH as well the acclaimed Netflix feature THE HARDER THEY FALL for director Jeymes Samuel and producer Jay Z. Other prominent work includes Station Eleven, Watchmen, ATLANTA, and the indie international film THE DEVIL TO PAY. Deadwyler's own award winning experimental film work has been presented at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport; Atlanta Film Festival; New Orleans Film Festival; Cucalorus Film Festival; and Oxford Film Fest. She has exhibited with CUE Art Foundation (NY), MAMBU BADU collective, Mint Gallery, Whitespace Gallery, The Luminary, Atlanta Contemporary Museum, Spelman College's Museum of Fine Art Black Box Series, among others. Numerous grants have supported Deadwyler's works, including IDEA CAPITAL, ELEVATE Atlanta, Living Walls, Synchronicity Theatre, WonderRoot Walthall Fellowship, and Artadia. She is a former Atlanta Film Festival Filmmaker-in-Residence, MINT Gallery Leap Year Fellowship Recipient, a 2020 Franklin Furnace Recipient and a 2021 Princess Grace Award Winner. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Join Luke Stewart, Cathy Wilkerson, and Alice Lynd for a conversation on Staughton Lynd's struggle against the war in Vietnam. Staughton Lynd was one of the principal intellectuals and activists making the radical argument that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was illegal under domestic and international law. Lynd was uncompromising in his courageous stance that the U.S. should immediately withdraw from Vietnam, and that soldiers and draftees should refuse to participate in the war based on their individual conscience and the Nuremberg Principles of 1950. Lynd's writings, speeches, and interviews against the war are collected in the recently released My Country is the World. For this launch event that volume's editor, Luke Stewart, will be joined by Cathy Wilkerson and Alice Lynd for a discussion of Staughton and Alice's activism against the war and its lessons for today's anti-imperialist struggles. Get My Country is the World from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1956-my-country-is-the-world Speakers: Luke Stewart is a historian focusing on the antiwar movements during the Vietnam War and the global war on terror. He has co-edited Let Them Stay: U.S. War Resisters in Canada, 2004-2016. He currently lives in Nantes, France. Cathy Wilkerson joined Students for a Democratic Society in 1963, supporting an active civil rights movement in Chester, PA. She continued with SDS after college, becoming editor of New Left Notes and then an organizer with the SDS Washington DC Region. After the assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969 she joined Weatherman, remaining a fugitive until 1980. After getting out of prison, she worked with the Attica civil suit, and then as an educator in NYC public schools for 20 years. See also Flying Close to the Sun, My Life as a Weatherman (2007). Staughton and Alice Lynd (respondant) were married for more than 71 years, having met during Harvard Summer School in the summer of 1950. While Staughton spoke, wrote, and in other ways opposed the Vietnam War, Alice expressed her concerns through collecting and publishing We Won't Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors (Beacon Press, 1968), and becoming a draft counselor. We Won't Go was the Lynds' first venture into doing oral history or, as Staughton put it, Doing History from the Bottom Up! (Haymarket, 2014). The Lynds partnered in editing Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Haymarket, expanded edition, 2011). See also, Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together (Lexington Books, 2009); Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistence: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in the Military and Behind Bars (PM Press, 2017); and Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History (Orbis Books, 3d ed. 2018).
Join activists from the movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta for a discussion of their struggle and its lessons. The movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta has reopened the prospect of mass abolitionist organizing after years of ongoing racist police murder, carceral expansion, and political quietism under a Democratic administration. The movement has also built important new links between abolitionist politics and climate, labor, and urban organizing. We are excited to share this panel, intended as a contribution to this vital movement and to expanding the contemporary horizons of Left organizing in the U.S. This panel of researchers and organizers will illuminate the deep backstory and intersectional context of the Weelaunee Forest struggle. An organizer with the member-based collective Community Movement Builders will speak to the importance of the forest movement as a struggle on behalf of ecological and racial justice. A researcher examining the international dimensions of police training and the disavowed role of police in counter-insurgency will consider the transnational circuits running throughout the proposal for Cop City. An organizer with the Southern Center for Human Rights will contextualize the fight within landscapes of abolitionism in Atlanta, including the movement against jail expansion there. A historian of the carceral state in Georgia will provide perspective on state violence in the region. Speakers: Micah Herskind is an organizer, policy advocate, and writer based in Atlanta, GA. Kwame Olufemi is a community organizer who has developed worker-owned cooperatives, organized petition drives, mobilized protests, mutual aid programs, cop watches, and community safety training programs to develop safety networks independent of the police. Stuart Schrader is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019). Sarah Haley is a historian interested in the history of gender and women, carceral history, Black feminist history and theory, prison abolition, and feminist archival methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/hWwJkxxMuhQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Imani Perry and Kaitlyn Greenidge for a discussion of Claudia Tate and Black Women Writers At Work. Long out of print, Black Women Writers at Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century. Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after. For this launch Imani Perry will be in conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge. Get Black Women Writers at Work from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1926-black-women-writers-at-work Speakers: Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, and in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and spent much of her youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. She lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons, Freeman Diallo Perry Rabb and Issa Garner Rabb. Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper's Bazaar. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books and out now. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/sYdedGXRV_g Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join NAASW and Haymarket for a panel discussion that will explain the harms of CAPTA and discuss what can be done about it. The so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), does not prevent and it does not treat. Instead, it targets our most vulnerable neighbors, particularly those living in poverty and especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous families. Through policies like mandated reporting, social workers, medical professionals, and other community helpers are made agents of the surveillance state and part of the machinery of family policing, regulation, separation, and destruction. Join NAASW and Haymarket for a panel discussion that will explain the harms of CAPTA and discuss what can be done about it. Panelists: Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, and educator. Her mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness to the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected. David P. Kelly, JD, MA, is Co-Director of the Family Justice Group. For over a decade he served in the United States Children's Bureau, holding positions as Special Assistant to the Associate Commissioner, Senior Policy Advisor on Courts and Justice and overseeing the Children's Bureau's work with the legal and judicial community. Prior to joining the federal government, David was an Assistant Staff Director at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law and served as Senior Assistant Child Advocate at the New Jersey Office of the Child Advocate. Matt Holm, MD, community pediatrician, Melrose, Bronx, NY Miriam Mack is Policy Director of The Bronx Defenders' Family Defense Practice. She received her J.D. from Boston University School of Law. Prior to joining The Bronx Defenders, Miriam was a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, focusing on issues of racial and reproductive justice. Richard Wexler, executive director National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, author, Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse (Prometheus Books: 1990, 1995). Jey Rajaraman joined Family Integrity & Justice Works in January 2022. Prior to that, she served as Chief Council and a supervising attorney of Legal Services of New Jersey's Family Representation Project (FRP). FRP provides parents in child abuse or neglect and termination of parental rights litigation with information, advice and representation. Additionally, the FRP provides advice and representation to youth in DCPP's care, both those who have become parent defendants themselves and those who are seeking aging-out services from the Division. Jey is a member of the ABA Parent Counsel Steering Committee. Jey is also an adjunct professor at Seton Hall Law School. Angela Olivia Burton is a public service lawyer with an emphasis on supporting the leadership of people with lived experience in the family policing and juvenile criminal punishment systems. Her recent publications include Toward Community Control of Child Welfare Funding: Repeal the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and Delink Child Protection from Family Wellbeing, with Angeline Montauban and Liberate the Black Family from Family Policing: A Reparations Perspective, with Joyce McMillan. This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/29MnYIDextQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join a panel of activists and experts to discuss the roots, nature, and politics of the war and Ukraine's resistance. This February marks one year since Russia's imperialist invasion of Ukraine. On the anniversary, people around the world are organizing events in solidarity with Ukraine's heroic struggle for self-determination. On Saturday, February 25, 2023, please join our panel of scholars and activists for a discussion of the roots, nature, and politics of the war and the resistance. Featured Speakers: Yuliya Yurchenko, Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich and author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict. Vladyslav Starodubstev, historian of Central and Eastern European region, and member of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh. Kirill Medvedev, poet, political writer, and member of the Russian Socialist Movement. Kavita Krishnan, Indian feminist, author of Fearless Freedom, former leader of the Communist Party of India (ML). Bill Fletcher, former President of TransAfrica Forum, former senior staff person at the AFL-CIO, and Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. Including solidarity statements from among others Barbara Smith, Eric Draitser, Haley Pessin, Ramah Kudaimi, Dave Zirin, Frieda Afary, Jose La Luz, Rob Barrill, and Cindy Domingo. This event is sponsored by The Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/WeIfVB7IykQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join us for discussion of Jon Melrod's new book, Fighting Times, and the class war on the shop floor in the 1970s. Amidst a rekindled interest in the efforts of student radicals of the 1960s to industrialize in workers' movement as part of a larger social transformation, Jon Melrod's Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War could not be more timely. Fighting Times recounts the thirteen-year journey of Jon Melrod to harness working-class militancy and jump start a revolution on the shop floor of American Motors. Melrod faces termination, dodges the FBI, outwits collaborators in the UAW, and becomes a central figure in a lawsuit against the rank-and-file newsletter Fighting Times, as he strives to build a class-conscious workers' movement from the bottom up. “An eloquent voice from the frontlines of the hard, bitter, exhilarating struggles for freedom and justice that have made the world a better place, and an inspiring guide for carrying the crucial struggle forward.”—Noam Chomsky A radical to the core, Melrod was a key part of campus insurrection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He left campus for the factory in 1972, hired along with hundreds of youthful job seekers onto the mind-numbing assembly line. Fighting Times paints a portrait of these rebellious and alienated young hires, many of whom were Black Vietnam vets. Join Melrod and Barry Eidlin, author of Labor and the Class Idea, for a discussion about Fighting Times, the politics and strategies of the era, and the legacies still shaping today's social movements. Get Fighting Times from PM Press: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1289 ———————————————————————————————————————————————— Speakers: Jon Melrod is a former student radical and rank and file militant, as well as a lawyer in San Francisco representing political refugees. He is the author of Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War. Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada. This event is sponsored by PM Press and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/AvMW0MwyUz0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The fifth discussion features Harsha Walia. Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and, most recently, Border and Rule (2021). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women's Memorial March Committee. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/wp-UBJT5DnQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Saket Soni and Naomi Klein for a launch event for The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America. ———————————————————————————————————————————————— Saket Soni, a Delhi-born labor organizer, was in his late 20s and working in New Orleans when he began to receive mysterious calls from inside a heavily guarded Mississippi work camp. He knew immediately that the callers were in crisis. But he could not have imagined they were caught up in one of the largest human trafficking schemes in modern US history. In his new book, THE GREAT ESCAPE: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, Soni tells the stunning story of five hundred Indian workers who were held in those camps, their escape, and the years-long campaign for justice that followed—a fight Saket Soni engineered. Bringing to light the invisible migrant workforce that rebuilds after climate disasters, The Great Escape reveals the government and corporate corruption fueling a hidden struggle at the intersection of climate change, racial justice, and immigration. For this launch event, Soni will be joined by internationally renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, to discuss migration policy in the U.S., the reality of twenty-first century trafficking, and the true costs of climate catastrophe. Order a copy of The Great Escape from Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781643750088 ———————————————————————————————————————————————— Speakers: Saket Soni is a labor organizer and human rights strategist working at the intersection of racial justice, migrant rights, and climate change. He is founder and director of Resilience Force, the voice of the rising workforce rebuilding America after climate disasters. Soni was profiled as an “architect of the next labor movement” in USA Today, chose as a 2022-23 Aspen Institute Fellow, and named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business for 2022. His work was the subject of a major New Yorker feature story in November 2021. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and international bestselling author of eight books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough and On Fire, which have been translated into over 35 languages. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept and an inaugural Marielle Franco fellow of the Social Justice Initiative Portal Project at the University of Chicago. In 2018, she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice and is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/APD7lLcYWGA Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join award-winning author China Miéville and New Yorker contributing writer E. Tammy Kim, for a discussion of Miéville's latest book, "A Spectre, Haunting" Few written works can so confidently claim to have shaped the course of history as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party. Since first rattling the gates of the ruling order in 1848, this incendiary pamphlet has never ceased providing fuel for the fire in the hearts of those who dream of a better world. Nor has it stopped haunting the nightmares of those who sit atop the vastly unequal social system it condemns. In A Spectre, Haunting, award-winning author China Miéville provides readers with a guide to understanding the Manifesto and the many specters it has conjured. Through his unique and unorthodox reading, Miéville offers a critical appraisal and a spirited defense of the modern world's most influential political document. For this launch event, Miéville will be joined by E. Tammy Kim for a conversation about contemporary capitalism's rapidly multiplying crises and the Manifesto's enduring relevance. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Get A Spectre, Haunting from Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1990-a-spectre-haunting ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City and the City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker. He has won the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. His non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London's Overthrow. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, Conjunctions and Granta, and he is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage. E. Tammy Kim is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the co-host of the Time to Say Goodbye podcast. She's also the writer-in-residence at the A/P/A Institute at NYU, a contributing editor at Lux magazine, and a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Type Media Center. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/PKwxKR5-QKU Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Joshua Frank's Atomic Days is an urgent look at the dark side of nuclear power. Hanford Nuclear Reservation, once the United States' largest plutonium production site, is now designated the most toxic place in America. We can't afford inaction: an accident at Hanford could make Chernobyl pale. Joshua will be joined by peace activist Frida Berrigan and reporter Indigo Olivier for a discussion on nuclear proliferation and the antiwar movement. Frida's recent article, "The End of the World is Back: Why We Need a New Generation of Nuclear Abolitionists" calls on us to join the fight for nuclear disarmament. The world as we know it is at stake. Buy Joshua's book, Atomic Days: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1940-atomic-days Speakers: Frida Berrigan is community activist and urban gardener living in New London, CT with her husband, three kids and six chickens. She is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood (OR Books, 2015). Her writing appears regularly at TomDispatch.com and Waging Nonviolence. Joshua Frank is an award-winning California-based journalist and co-editor of the political magazine CounterPunch. He is a co-author of several books, including The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (AK Press) and Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books), which examines the ongoing environmental and human turmoil of the Hanford Nuclear site in Washington state. Indigo Olivier is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. Her writing on politics, labor, and higher education has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and In These Times, where she is a former investigative reporting fellow. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and In These Times. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/Ghdh75MkNmA Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The fourth discussion features Elleza Kelley. Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars. Speakers: Elleza Kelley is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University. Kelley works on African American literature, with an emphasis on black geographies and radical spatial practice in the United States. Her current research traces how black spatial knowledge and practice appear in literature and art, particularly through experimentations with form, genre, and media. Her first book project looks at practices of inscription and mark-making as modes of spatial production, representation, and reinvention. Her writing can be found in Antipode, The New Inquiry, Cabinet Magazine, and elsewhere. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Join the upcoming events in the Freedom Dreams Series: www.eventbrite.com/cc/freedom-drea…-kelley-1288129 Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/xQdu-7fpVbU Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: @haymarketbooks
In American Sex Tape, Jameka Williams captures the reader's gaze and stares right back. In this stunning debut collection, Williams offers a deeply personal investigation into how Americans (herself included) have been duped, buying into classism, sexism, and racist beauty ideals, while sacrificing self-love and self-determination. With whip-fast profanity and fiery humor, she charts a tender, exalting, and vibrant path to freedom from mirrors, stages, and screens. Fiercely feminist, Black, American, and powerful, Williams speaks for a generation of obsessive social media influencers and consumers, revealing the complex ways in which we are actors and witnesses, and victims in our public and private performances. Though we may be permanent residents of this soulless cultural landscape, this stunning collection refuses to let it define us. ___________________________________ Speakers: Jameka Williams holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. Her poetry has been published in Prelude Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, and Gulf Coast, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she resides in Chicago, Illinois. Kemi Alabi is a poet and culture worker from southeastern Wisconsin. They're the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021). Alabi's work appears in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Boston Review, and has been supported through fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Tin House, and Pink Door. They currently live in Chicago, Illinois. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and University of Wisconsin Press. Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join us for a conversation on rebuilding the labor movement with Daisy Pitkin & former CTU president Jesse Sharkey Daisy Pitkin's On The Line recounts the ups and downs of a bold five-year campaign to organize industrial laundry factories in the notoriously anti-union state of Arizona. Pitkin offers readers a participant's insight into what it took to forge solidarity so powerful that it overcame hazardous working-conditions, broken labor laws, and vicious opposition from the employer. After years of aggressively anti-teacher rhetoric and hostile national educational policy, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators took over the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in 2010 on the pledge to fight for the schools that teachers, students, and Chicago's communities deserve. In 2012 the CTU led an inspiring strike that won massive community support and contributed to revitalizing the tradition of labor militancy. For this virtual launch event for On The Line, Daisy Pitkin will be joined by former CTU president Jesse Sharkey to discuss what it will take to rebuild a fighting labor movement and how at their best unions can reach beyond the workplace and transform whole communities. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of On The Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union from Pilsen Community Books: https://www.pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/G_f3vj27PIe7xAkkeZifrA ----------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Daisy Pitkin has spent more than twenty years as a community and union organizer, working first in support of garment workers around the world, and then for U.S. labor unions organizing industrial laundry workers. Her essays have been awarded the Montana Prize, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, the New Millennium Award, and the Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship. She grew up in rural Ohio and received an MFA from the University of Arizona. Pitkin lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she works as an organizer with an offshoot of the union UNITE. Find her at daisypitkin.net. Jesse Sharkey is a teacher in the Chicago Public School system, and the former president of the Chicago Teachers Union. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Pilsen Community Books, The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), and Labor Notes. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/01MPw6F9puo Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Spectre for a discussion of the roots of the uprising, the various struggles expressed in it, and its impact and possible trajectory. An unprecedented, national wave of protests and labor actions have swept China. This Spectre Live panel moderated by David McNally and featuring Eli Friedman, Stephanie Wang, Rayhan Asat, and Tobita Chow will examine the roots of the uprising, the various struggles expressed in it, as well as its impact and possible trajectory. Moderator: David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston and director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism. McNally is the author of several books including Blood and Money, Global Slump, and Monsters of the Market. Speakers: Eli Friedman teaches in the department of International and Comparative Labor at Cornell University and is the author of The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia 2022). He is also the co-editor of The China Question: Toward Left Perspectives (Verso 2022). Rayhan Asat is a Uyghur human rights advocate and Tom & Andi Bernstein Fellow at Yale Law School. Since 2020, she has led a public campaign for the release of her brother, Ekpar Asat, who has been held in the Xinjiang internment camp system since 2016, and on behalf of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China. Stephanie Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at St. Lawrence University. Her work focuses on feminist political economy, labor, affect, NGO politics and queer studies. She is the author of “Unfinished Revolution: An Overview of Three Decades of LGBT Activism in China,” in Made in China Journal. Tobita Chow is the founding Director of Justice Is Global, which organizes for a just and sustainable global economy and an end to right-wing nationalism. He is a leading progressive critic of the rise of great power conflict between the US and China and the threat this trend poses to progressive forces in both countries. ----------------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by Spectre and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/qTfVfWkdq34 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The third discussion features Samora Pinderhughes. Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars. Speakers: Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change and works in the tradition of the black surrealists, those who bend word, sound, and image towards the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes is a prison abolitionist and an advocate for process over product. His music is renowned for its emotionality, its honesty about difficult and vulnerable topics, and its careful details in word and sound. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Join the upcoming events in the Freedom Dreams Series: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/freedom-dreams-with-robin-dg-kelley-1288129 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/gTCtienJ8LA Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join an educational panel featuring Iranian activists and scholars for a discussion of the struggle in Iran and what we can learn from it. Chanting “Women, Life, Freedom,” protests continue to sweep Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iranian police. As our rights in the U.S. are threatened by the government, politicians and the courts, Iranian women and their allies are pointing the way forward to winning rights in far more difficult circumstances. They are fighting for self-determination and the right to control their lives free of outside intervention, including from the United States. We in the United States have a lot to learn from people in other countries about how to preserve and expand our rights. We embrace the right of all to control their lives free of outside intervention, including from the United States. Please join Chicago for Abortion Rights for an educational panel featuring Iranian activists and scholars for an exciting discussion about their struggle to win women's rights to control their own bodies and much more! Speakers: Mahshid Mir studied medicine in Tehran and after graduation moved to the US for her postdoc fellowship in cardiology at Harvard. Her residency training in internal medicine was at St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago. Mir is a healer in her day job and an activist in her volunteer time, finding the meaning of life in advocating for the right thing and devoting her life to improvement. Dr. Zohreh Ghavamshahidi is a retired Iranian-American political science professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she was chair of the Women's Studies and Anthropology Departments, and taught courses in international relations and international law. A Fulbright Scholar, she has written extensively about the intersections of gender and religious identities in the Middle East and in the diaspora, and their relationships to state building and common stereotypes. Roya Karbakhsh is an Iranian-born artist. Her work reflects the inner strength of women as captured through their eyes. As an observer and critic, her detailed works illuminate the feelings of repression and the desire for the collapse of the traditional ‘ways of life' that are demanded in Iran. Roya's paintings portray women from different levels of existence, and are brought together in scenes that seem to take place outside the normal perceptions of time. Her focus on the eyes show the spiritual power and the indomitable spirit that resides within the soul of all women. Karbakhsh works as a freelance artist and art teacher in Chicago and surrounding suburbs. Moderator: Mandy Medley is a socialist feminist and a member of Chicago for Abortion Rights. This event is sponsored by Chicago For Abortion Rights and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/T9EfOQ7hhVg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join us for a discussion of the need to center Palestine liberation as a transnational and abolitionist social work issue. Join Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, PhD, Suhad Tabahi, PhD, and Stéphanie Wahab, PhD for an abolitionist discussion concerning the criminalization of Palestinians, dead and alive, in Palestine. Drs. Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Tabahi will offer a critical analysis of the current political moment, exposing the ways settler colonial criminalization operates to uproot, dispossess, dismember, and further oppress Palestinians. They will also address the ethical concerns and moral imperatives for disrupting settler colonial violence enacted through criminalization, alongside the need to center Palestinian voices, epistemics, and practices within Palestinian liberation and solidarity work. Why Palestine matters and the intersectional struggle for justice and human rights will also be addressed. Speakers: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist, is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her scholarship focuses on knowledge production in relation to accumulative trauma, state criminality, surveillance, gender violence, and law and society. Author of: Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study, Security Theology; Surveillance and the Politics of Fear; Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding; co-edited volumes Engaged students in conflict zones, community-engaged courses in Israel as a vehicle for change; When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism; and is currently finalizing The Cunning of Gender Violence. Suhad Tabahi is a proud first generation Palestinian American. She currently serves as Director and Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Dominican University, Illinois. She received her Masters from the University of Chicago in Social Service Administration and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago ( UIC). Her research focuses on anti- Muslim racism/ Islamophobia, International Social Work and Palestine, decolonizing social work curriculum, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in the Muslim community, and immigrant and refugees' experiences and the role of transnationalism. She currently uses photovoice as a method of understanding the lived experiences of the Palestinian/Arab and Latinx communities navigating a post- Trump U.S. in the times of COVID. She has over 15 years' experience in working with minoritized populations across the Chicagoland area. She teaches across the curriculum in areas of practice, policy, research, and diversity. This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), Social Workers for Palestine, and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/K2F0ZszqLb0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Cherríe Moraga and Martha Gonzalez for a conversation in celebration of the 25th Anniversary Edition of Moraga's classic Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. In a series of journal entries—some original passages, others revisited and expanded in retrospect—Cherrié Moraga details her experiences with pregnancy, birth, and the early years of lesbian parenting. With the premature birth of her son—when HIV-related mortality rates were at their highest—Moraga, a new mother at 40-years-old, was forced to confront the fragile volatility of life and death; in these recorded dreams and reflections, her terror and resilience are made palpable. The particular challenges of queer parenting prove transformative as Moraga navigates her intersecting roles as Chicana mother, child, lover, friend, artist, activist, and more. With an updated introduction and other additions, including an afterword by Rafael Angel Moraga, this revised 25th anniversary edition of Waiting in the Wings is thoughtful and emotive, with prose that is sharp and beautifully written, from the voice of a beloved and incomparable writer. Get the book from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1933-waiting-in-the-wings ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright whose professional life began in 1981 with her co-editorship of the groundbreaking feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of several collections of her own writings, including A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Native Country of the Heart, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood, and also forthcoming from Haymarket in 2023, Loving in the War Years and Other Writings 1978-1998. Martha Gonzalez is a Chicana artivista (artist/activist) musician, feminist music theorist and Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Scripps/Claremont College. A Fulbright (2007-2008), Ford (2012-2013), Woodrow Wilson (2016-2017), and MacArthur Foundation Fellow (2022), her academic interests have been fueled by her own musicianship as a singer/songwriter and percussionist for Grammy Award (2013) winning band Quetzal. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/B9A3o70Fie8 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Diamond Sharp's Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free?Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. Sharp's poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp's lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.Join us for this livestream of the in-person book launch event for Super Sad Black Girl with Diamond Sharp, Eve Ewing, Raych Jackson and Jamila Woods. -------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Diamond Sharp is a poet and essayist from Chicago. Super Sad Black Girl is her debut collection of poems. Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, and most recently a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and performer. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube. She is the 2017 NUPIC Champion and a 2017 Pink Door fellow. Jackson recently voiced 'DJ Raych' in the Jackbox game, Mad Verse City. She voices Tiffany in Battu, an upcoming animation recently picked up by Cartoon Network. Her latest play, “Emotions & Bots”, premiered at the Woerdz Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland. Jamila Woods is a Chicago-bred singer/songwriter and award-winning poet whose inspirations include Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Morrison. Following the 2016 release of her debut album HEAVN, Woods received critical acclaim for her singular sound that is both rooted in soul and wholly modern. Her 2019 sophomore release LEGACY! LEGACY! featured 12 tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced her life and work. She is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and co-editor of BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic (2018). Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/W_yl0SZR050 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The second discussion features Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars. Speakers: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning scholar and public intellectual. Taylor is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2021. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Taylor's scholarship examines racism and public policy, inequality, Black politics, radical politics and social movements in the United States, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Taylor is working on two projects, one that look at the dynamics of race, class and politics in the first generation after the Black social movements of the 1960s and a book that examines the Black radical tradition mediated through the life and politics of Angela Y. Davis. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation and Jacobin, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. Taylor has been named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians. For eight years, Taylor was a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Join the upcoming events in the Freedom Dreams Series: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/freedom-dreams-with-robin-dg-kelley-1288129 Watch the live event recording: youtu.be/BBoQI9HU1rk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: @haymarketbooks
Join Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt as they discuss Bacevich's new book, On Shedding an Obsolete Past. The book provides a much-needed and comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the Trump and Biden administrations. These policy decisions have produced a series of costly disappointments and outright failures that have destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world and cost US taxpayers astronomical sums of money. Bacevich and Engelhardt will analyze how these failures occurred and what needs to be done to prevent similar failures in the future. He reminds us that, by understanding the past, we can alter our current trajectory and transform the world for the better. Get the book from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1949-on-shedding-an-obsolete-past Speakers: Andrew Bacevich is president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. A graduate of West Point and Princeton, he is also professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. Among his many books are The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, America's War for the Greater Middle East, and most recently, After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed. Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has written Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001–2050. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Dh8KFTRsr7Y Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
¡Mike Davis, presente! Three longtime allies of Mike Davis (1946–2022) will discuss the life and legacy of the author, geologist, historian, and organizer—and the inspiration we take from his life and work for the struggles ahead. Speakers: Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire. Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement. Davis's memoir was recently published in a new edition by Haymarket Books. Geri Silva, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, has spent the past 40 years in all forms of struggle for human, political, and economic rights. Her activity covers the span from immigration rights to welfare rights to the right to decent housing for all in need. For the past 20-plus years she has fought against the rampant and ongoing abuses in the courts and at the hands of the police. Silva is a founding member of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) in 1992, Families to Amend California's Three Strikes (FACTS) in 1996, Fair Chance Project (FCP) in 2009, California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC) in 2011, and FUEL—Families United to End LWOP (Life Without Parole) in 2017. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson's Birmingham classic America's Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso), and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021). Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/u5xtmUWdWbc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
For most of the left, political violence is a forbidden topic. But at this moment, queer and trans people face the real threat of violence from a growing movement of armed fascists in America. How can we think about this, and what steps are necessary to defeat them? What do existing projects to keep us safe have to teach us? Note: This discussion occurred on November 2, 2022. Speakers: Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (published by Verso); and the co-director of They Won't Call It Murder (executive produced by Field of Vision). She has reported on violence against massage workers in Flushing; attacks on trans rights across Texas; resistance to police killings in Columbus; and the global movement for sex workers' rights. She's currently at work on a new book, A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice of America (to be published by Little, Brown and Company). sheila t is a huge nerd and trans feminine person and anarchist living in philadelphia. She's been participating in anarchist and queer struggles since around 2010. LV is a communist living in Los Angeles. She organized with Bash Back Denver and with the 2010 Bash Back Convergence as well as a number of militant queer groups in Los Angeles such as the Trans Liberation LA, Trans Undocumented Rapid Response Network (TURRN) and 2014 Queerpocalypse. She is a practicing conflict mediator and developing an eco defense video game. Max (they/them) is a grassroots, abolitionist and antifascist, community organizer from Sacramento, California. Their work primarily revolves around the abolition of private property and prisons, but their efforts to stand up against fascist violence, including state, but specifically far-right and christo extremism have looked like participating and organizing active confrontations to their platforms since 2016, and most recently throughout 2020 to now. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/45JZURd1dGo Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Pinko: https://pinko.online.
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The first discussion features aja monet. Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars. Speakers: aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 20072007 and aja monet follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. Her first full collection of poems is titled, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter on Haymarket Books. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, and spirituality. In 20182018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 20192019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. aja monet cofounded a political home for artists and organizers called, Smoke Signals Studio. She facilitates “Voices: Poetry for the People,” a workshop and collective in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders. She is currently working on her next full collection of poems entitled, Florida Water. aja Monet also serves as the new Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Join the upcoming events in the Freedom Dreams Series: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/freedom-dreams-with-robin-dg-kelley-1288129 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/BBoQI9HU1rk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
A conversation with authors Andrea Ritchie, Robyn Maynard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. As movements to defund and divest from policing and invest in community safety expand in the wake of the 2020 Upris