Haymarket Books Live

The U.S. is experiencing one of the largest waves of political repression in its history. Academics, socialists, leftists, intellectuals, Palestinians, Muslims, labor organizers, trans people, queer folks, migrants, immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the working-class, the poor are all under attack. The state’s efforts to repress free speech are part of a larger campaign to silence and stamp out dissent of all kinds, andmove the U.S. further towards authoritarianism. Recently, Tom Alter, a tenured historian, was fired from his job at Texas State University, simply for speaking as a Socialist.We must fight back. Join us for this 90 minute Speak Out! with activists, organizers and writers who will share ideas about the meaning of MAGA McCarthyism and how we can together resist.Speakers: Tom Alter. Tom Alter is a scholar and activist who was recently fired by Texas State University. He is the author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas. He is a member of the Texas State Employees Union, the American Association of University Professors, and Socialist Horizon.Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer, and writer based in Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States and has been cited by NPR, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and other outlets. She co-wrote the revolutionary sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions Press, 2022). She writes a regular column on Palestine and politics for In These Times magazine. Her essays have appeared in Jacobin, Truthout, Zeteo, and other publications.Jodi Dean is Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her most recent books are Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging and Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, both published by Verso.Catarina Kissinger is an organizer with the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU / CWA Local 6186), where she helps lead the union’s campaign in defense of Dr. Tom Alter and works to build collective power among faculty, staff, and student workers in higher education.Karim Mattar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education. He is currently at work on "Writing the Catastrophe: Trauma and Responsibility Across Generation," a monograph that interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to Palestine. Karim is co-chair of the CAHE Palestine Caucus and Faculty Editor of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom."David McNally has taught history and political economy at the University of Houston and York University in Toronto. He is currently director of the Project on Race and Capitalism. David is the author of eight books including most recently, Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History published earlier this year by the University of California Press.This event is sponsored by Committee to Defend Tom Alter, Texas State Employees Union/CWA Local 6186, and Haymarket Books.

Join Kelly Hayes in conversation with Shane Burley, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Atena O. Danner as they discuss the launch of Read this When Things Fall Apart, bundle of letters to activists and organizers on the frontlines in catastrophic times.In social movements, some heartbreaks are all but inevitable. Campaigns will be lost. Mental health crises will occur. Social ills, like gender-based violence, will manifest themselves in movement spaces. People will experience profound personal losses. Grief, alienation, and despair can grind us under. Sometimes, we need accompaniment. Sometimes, we need to be met where we’re at by a caring voice of experience. Read This When Things Fall Apart is a care package for activists and organizers building power under fascistic, demoralizing conditions. It’s an outstretched hand, offering history lessons, personal anecdotes, and practical advice about how to navigate the woes of justice work. A survival guide for the heart, this is a book for activists to keep close, and to share with co-strugglers in need.Personal, reflective, and hopeful, Read This When Things Fall Apart harnesses the writers' individual moments of despair into living, breathing wisdom that chips away at the supposed inevitability of fascist life. Restorative like a letter from a trusted friend and invigorating like a story from a mentor, the book is an indispensable companion for all of us navigating challenging times. Featuring letters from Mariame Kaba, Ashon Crawley, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eman Abdelhadi, Brian Merchant, and more.Get the book: https://www.pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/vCQt68DQBH3U0CUUWZyWRwSpeakers:Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator and photographer. They host Truthout’s podcast Movement Memos and are co-author of the book Let This Radicalize You, with Mariame Kaba. Hayes is also the creator of Organizing My Thoughts, a weekly newsletter about politics and justice work.Shane Burley is a journalist and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author and editor of four books, including ¡No Pasaran!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis (AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2022) and Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (coauthored with Ben Lorber; Melville House, 2024). His work has been featured in places like NBC News, The Daily Beast, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, Truthout, In These Times, Jewish Currents, The Baffler, Yes! Magazine, and Oregon Humanities.Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/she) is an older cousin, regular person, memory worker, disability and transformative justice uncle bytch, and the author or coeditor of ten books including The Future Is Disabled (coedited with Ejeris Dixon; Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press, 2020), Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), Tonguebreaker (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019), and Dirty River (Arsenal, 2016). A 2020–2021 Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle short-lister, and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers.Atena O. Danner is a cultural worker who imagines Black liberation, engaged in boundless curiosity. As a poet, singer, and visual artist, Atena creates work that encompasses kitchen-table specificity and folk story relatability, covering topics including neurodiversity, human connection, and collective liberation. As an organizer and activist, she has worked to incorporate struggles for justice into her life as a caregiver in a family of complex needs while also writing and publishing in journals, antholo- gies, and her own book of poetry, Incantations for Rest: Poems, Meditations & Other Magic (Skinner House, 2022), which was awarded a Nautilus Silver Award for poetry in 2023.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/qrpIX72ivqsBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us as author Hamid Dabashi will be in conversation with Muhannad Ayyash as the two discuss Dabashi's latest book, After SavageryAs the death toll in Gaza continues to rise, what remains of the theories we use to understand our world? Join Hamid Dabashi and Dr. Muhannad Ayyash as they discuss and expose the racist roots of Western philosophy. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.Get the book, After Savagery: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2607-after-savagerySpeakers:Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Among Dabashi’s recent books are On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past, The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West, and Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World.Dr. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada where he is a Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel and A Hermeneutics of Violence, has co-edited two books, and is the author of over twenty journal articles and book chapters, and over fifty commentaries and opinion pieces.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/C1nXFhST1H4Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us for a virutal book launch of Displaced in Gaza, A powerful collection of testimonies from Palestinians facing genocide and displacement with hope and resistance.Displaced in Gaza aims to raise global awareness of how violent displacement has impacted the lives of Palestinians—students, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, educators, and those who already survived the Nakba of 1948. In Gaza, 2.3 million Palestinians have been subjected to starvation, mass destruction, and targeted killing. Yet they endure.This book is a commitment to the longstanding Palestinian tradition of storytelling, documenting both the horror of the genocide and the resilience of the Palestinian people. The stories in this collection are not merely accounts of suffering, they are assertions of humanity, resistance, hope, and the unbreakable bond that ties Palestinians to their homeland.Displaced in Gaza is a collaboration between the American Friends Service Committee and the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at Universiti Malaya.Order Displaced in Gaza: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2620-displaced-in-gazaSpeakers: Dr Yousef Aljamal is a Palestinian journalist and author from Gaza. He is the Gaza Coordinator at the AFSC. He is the co-editor of Displaced in Gaza. He holds an MA degree from the Department of International and Strategic Studies at the University of Malaya in Malaysia. He was awarded his PhD from the Middle East Institute at Sakarya University in Turkey. In addition to his research interests in diaspora, security, and indigenous studies, Yousef Aljamal has been involved on a number of book projects including translations of books on Palestinian prisoners, among them “Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian Child Prisoners Speak” (2016), and a collection of stories about the shared struggle of Palestinian and Irish Hunger Strikers. Most recently he edited “If I Must Die” an anthology of poetry and prose by the recently assassinated Palestinian poet and academic, Dr Refaat Alareer.Norma Hashim has been involved in advocacy and relief work for Palestine since the 2008 attacks on Gaza, and is treasurer of Viva Palestina Malaysia . Other than Displaced in Gaza, she has co-edited three books with Yousef Aljamal on Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons - “The Prisoners’ Diaries“(2013) , “Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian child prisoners speak”(2016) which has been published in the US in support of a legislative bill for human rights for Palestinian children, and “ A Shared Struggle: Stories of Palestinian and Irish Hunger Strikers”(2021). In 2022 she founded the Hashim Sani Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Malaya to address the need for a Palestine research and knowledge.Zoe Jannuzi works as the Palestine Activism Program Coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee. She activates folks across the United States and the world to further their visions for a world free of apartheid, occupation, colonialism, and genocide. Zoe graduated from Swarthmore College in 2022 with a major in Peace Education and minors in History and Dance Performance. Alongside Yousef M. Aljamal, Norma Hashim, and Noor Nabulsi, she helped edit Displaced in Gaza, bringing 27 incredible, heartbreaking, and wise stories from Gaza to a U.S. audience.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cxhWkrk26oBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us for the next event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is joined by Uahikea Maile for a conversation on decolonial strategies that look to water as a catalyst for radical transformation. Co-sponsored by Pilsen Community BooksIn her powerful new book, Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.Theory of Water is a genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force–water–through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers.Speakers:Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and member of Alderville First Nation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is the author of seven previous books, including Rehearsals for Living with Robyn Maynard, and the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies. Her newest book is Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.Dr. Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, organizer, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is assistant professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Maile’s current book manuscript, Gifts of Sovereignty: Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Politics in Hawaiʻi, examines the historical development and contemporary formation of settler colonial capitalism in Hawai‘i and gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn it by issuing responsibilities for balancing relationships with ‘āina, the land and that who feeds.This event is co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books and Haymarket Books, and is part of the Haymarket Presents speakers series. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxWlazKmtQ4Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

A perilous situation faces Ukraine in the aftermath of the recent Trump-Putin summit, in which the partition of its land and people were proposed without a Ukrainian voice at the table. This panel will discuss the regional and global ramifications of Russia’s war of occupation and ways to solidarize with those opposing it.Speakers:Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, clinical social worker, and a member of Vermont’s Progressive Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, and recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.Ilya Budraitskis is a political researcher and socialist activist previously based in Moscow. His essay collection Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia was published by Verso in 2022.Denys Bondar, a native of Ukraine, is a professor of physics at Tulane University and is a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network.Howie Hawkins, USN and Green Party presidential candidate 2020This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Ukraine Solidarity Network.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHRol0nAhMBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join internationalist organizers discussing the lessons contemporary international solidarity movements can learn from past struggles against the Vietnam War and in support of Vietnamese liberation.View the A Luta Continua Zine Series: https://bit.ly/intlsolidarityzinesDownload the Solidarity and War in Vietnam Zine: https://bit.ly/vietnamzine2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the victory of the Vietnamese liberation forces over the imperialist US military. This timing coincides with the release of the zine, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF Is Gonna Win: Solidarity and the War in Vietnam 1955-1975, written by James Kilgore. The zine is an overview of the international solidarity efforts that emerged in the US and beyond in support of the Vietnamese struggle and is part of the zine series A La Luta Continua from Community Justice Exchange.The launch of this zine comes at a moment when a massive global solidarity movement has emerged in support of the liberation of Palestine. In this webinar, a panel comprised of individuals who took part in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s, as well as contemporary activists engaged in Palestinian solidarity organizing, will share perspectives on the parallels and differences in the struggles, look at lessons learned from the support for the Vietnamese, and assess how we might learn from that history. The discussion hopes to provoke answers on how we can mobilize more support for Palestinian freedom and build a global movement based on international solidarity and visions of true liberation.This event is organized by Community Justice Exchange in partnership with Haymarket Books.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF89oS7CtL4Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

In this engaging discussion, a powerhouse panel tackles education and organizing for justice. Lara Kiswani emphasizes the importance of centering impacted voices, while Merrie Najimy explores anti-racist pedagogy through storytelling. Maya Suzuki Daniels highlights the evolving nature of dialogue in education. Mizue Aizeki shares insights on resisting surveillance technologies, and Rebecca Vilkomerson discusses linking philanthropy to Palestinian liberation efforts. Together, they delve into the challenges of teaching and organizing, advocating for solidarity and resilience in the face of adversity.

Join Wen Stephenson and Jane Hirshfield for a conversation on faith, humanism, and radical solidarity in the face of fascism and climate catastrophe-Wen Stephenson's new book, Learning to Live in the Dark is a collection of hard-hitting and deeply personal essays in which the Nation writer and veteran activist traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophesFaced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle—including the acclaimed American poet Jane Hirshfield.For this event, Hirshfield will join Stephenson to take up the urgent question of how to hold on to a radical commitment to a better world when crises beset us from all sides.Purchase a copy of Learning to Live in the Dark: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2523-learning-to-live-in-the-darkSpeakers:Jane Hirshfield, among American poetry's foremost voices for the biosphere and writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), is the author most recently of The Asking: New & Selected Poems. Hirshfield's honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Founder in 2017 of Poets for Science, Hirshfield is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A correspondent for The Nation and frequent contributor to The Baffler, he is the author previously of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other (2015), about the pivotal early years of the U.S. climate justice movement. He is a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, where he edited the Sunday Ideas section, and has written for those and many other publications, including Slate, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital. He lives near Boston.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewPT5_RW8wEBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

The Trump regime took advantage of the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement under the Biden administration to launch a full-scale assault on higher education. He has unleashed ICE on student activists, branded any dissent against Israel’s genocidal war “antisemitic,” bullied universities into cancelling programs on race and gender, and defunded entire institutions. Join us for this Spectre Live panel of activist educators to discuss how to resist Trump’s New McCarthyism.Speakers:Isaac Kamola is a professor of political science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is author of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (2021) and Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (2019). He currently directs the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).Heba Gowayed is a writer and associate professor sociology at CUNY Hunter college and a current Carnegie Fellow. She is the author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (2022).Vineeta Singh is a fellow at AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, an associate editor of Ethnic Studies Review, and a non-tenure track college teacher. She studies the history of US higher education as a site of racial contestation, so we can put contemporary confrontations about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the context of the four hundred years of racial capitalism. Her work for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is currently available as a limited run series on the podcast “AAUP Presents.”Zoé Samudzi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African-American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University. She is also a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution (AFRIMUHERE).This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AokV9UO14ek Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org