After Life: A Conversation on Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America

Join us for a discussion on the collective history of the experience of COVID-19, mass uprisings for racial justice, and more. Join Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, Yohuru Williams and Heather Ann Thompson as they discuss their the new book After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America. They will share their thoughts on the collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election. Get After Life from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1927-after-life Speakers: Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She was the 2020 President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Barnes is the author of the forthcoming book Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface. Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian, writer, and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, and the co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power. Yohuru Williams is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History, and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven, and Teaching Beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies, and, co-author with Bryan Shih of The Black Panthers: Portrait of an Unfinished Revolution. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, as well as a public intellectual who writes for such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, and The Nation. Thompson has received research fellowships from such institutions as Harvard University, Art for Justice, Cambridge University, and the Guggenheim, and her justice advocacy work has also been recognized with a number of distinguished awards. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/4i6x8KDkirc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks