Haymarket Books Live

For more than two decades, the movement to end mass incarceration has sought to challenge policing, criminalization and incarceration as harmful institutions. Amongst the harms perpetrated by these carceral systems is the punishment paradigm, a term that signifies the hegemonic power of punishment as it now exists in the U.S., embedded in culture, media, law, and policy. Despite a heightened consciousness around the negative impacts of punitive systems following the uprisings of 2020, the institutions of punishment have remained largely intact. The Trump administration has significantly escalated the use of punishing institutions, like policing, detention, incarceration and deportation, to target migrants, dissidents, and all people at the margins. The federal government has also increased its use of punishment practices, like the threats to punish institutions for not complying with government demands, the outsourcing of punishment to everyday people, and the impunity offered for otherwise punishable offenses to those who side with the administration. This escalation has demonstrated the centrality of punishment to authoritarian regimes, and laid bare the devastating consequences for our communities. Speakers: Laura Whitehorn served 14+ years in federal prison for the “Resistance Conspiracy” case.” Released in 1999, she works in the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPPCampaign.com), and for the release of political prisoners. She edited the "The War Before" by late Black Panther political prisoner and organizer, Safiya Bukari (feministpress.org) and helped organized the 2014 Interference Archive exhibition "Self Determination Inside/Out" which showed how the struggles of incarcerated people affected and shaped social movements on the outside. With her partner, the writer Susie Day, she was part of the prison, labor, and academic delegation to Palestine in 2016. Nadia Ben-Youssef (she/her) is the granddaughter of artists, refugees, and revolutionaries. A human rights lawyer by training, Nadia currently serves as the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal and advocacy organization working with social movements and communities under threat to dismantle racism, cisheteropatriarchy, economic oppression and abusive state practices. She has expertise in international human rights fora and mechanisms, and extensive experience developing advocacy strategies to influence U.S. decision-makers. Her work often centers at the intersection of art and advocacy, and she curates exhibits and artistic programming that document key human rights concerns, celebrate social movements, and allow creatives the space to chart the future. Central to Nadia's lifework is a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and she is a proud co-founder of the Adalah Justice Project. Nadia is a member of the NY State bar, and serves on the Boards of Adalah Justice Project, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Multitude Films. Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Teen Vogue, The Nation, Truthout, Inquest, and The Forge. Charlene Allen is a writer and activist who works with community organizations to heal trauma and foster justice. She has been a restorative and healing justice practitioner for over a decade and advocates for policy changes to expand the use of community-based restorative practices. As a writer, Charlene’s debut novel, Play the Game, (HarperCollins, 2023), explores and advances restorative and healing justice practices in real life situations Cameron W. Rasmussen is a social worker, researcher, educator, and facilitator. He is an assistant professor at the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where he researches issues of accountability, violence, and justice, and the intersections of abolition and social work. Cameron is a Co-Editor of Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes and the Practice of Community Care and is a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work (NAASW). Co-Sponsors: Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, Center for Justice at Columbia University, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Haymarket Books.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/CAyIxFkh7U4Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us for a virtual book launch of How to End Family Policing: From Outrage to Action, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that claim to protect children make them—and our communities—less safe. Based on decades of experience, organizing, and research, How to End Family Policing argues that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. In fact, rather than the misleading language of "child welfare," many scholars and activists describe these institutions as "family policing." Drawing on abolitionist principals, this much-needed intervention shows that no kinship network benefits from investigation, surveillance, policing, or forced separation. Contributors include community organizers, parents, civil rights attorneys, scholars, social workers, and survivors of family policing. Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Ritchie, and Erin Miles Cloud will discuss the historical context of the family policing system and, vitally, how organizers have strategized against it. Order a copy of How to End Family Policing here. Speakers: Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women; and of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. She co-founded Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people, and led INCITE!'s work on law enforcement violence. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub and National Black Women's Justice Institute she worked with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and secure deep investments in community-based strategies that will produce greater public safety. Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. She is a 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book, TORN APART is about how the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition can build a safer world. Erin Miles Cloud is a civil rights attorney. She is the co-founder of Movement for Family Power, co-editor of How to End Family Policing, and a former family defense public defender. She is a Black- mixed race mother of two beautiful children.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/dkkhftUco84Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Tareq Baconi in conversation with Bill Ayers about his new book Fire in Every Direction, a memoir of political and queer awakening, of impossible love amidst generations of displacement, and what it means to return home. One of LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025, Fire in Every Direction is an account of finding oneself through histories of dispossession and reclaiming what has been silenced. Speakers: Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award, and Fire in Every Direction. Bill Ayers is an educator, organizer and author of numerous books including When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation (Beacon Press) and Demand the Impossible! A Radical Manifesto (Haymarket Books). This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Pilsen Community Books.Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/KwvEPPKvD6wBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Haymarket Books, Labor Notes, and the American Prospect for a discussion of how to build labor's power in the Trump era.With an emboldened Trump in the White House for a second term, the ground has shifted dramatically for unions. The labor movement, like many institutions, is scrambling to devise strategies to build power—or even just survive—during these challenging times.This authoritarian consolidation of power is testing unions. What can unions do to survive in the second Trump presidency? What tactics and strategies can help organize more new members and best survive an all-out assault on labor and other rights?Speakers:Brandon Mancilla, UAW Region 9A DirectorDiamonte Brown, President, Baltimore Teachers UnionJackson Potter, VP, Chicago Teachers Unionmoderated by David Dayen, The American Prospect and Natascha Elena Uhlmann, Labor Notes.This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Labor Notes, and the American Prospect.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/niZH5ErNG_gBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Haymarket Books and Historical Materialism for a launch and discussion of The Founding of the Red Trade Union International.In 1921 revolutionary trade-union leaders from across the world met to found the Red Trade Union International, representing millions of workers. The gathering brought together a wide variety of forces within the global labor movement, with proceedings that included acrimonious debates between syndicalists and other currents over the purpose and tasks of trade unions, the nature of class-struggle unionism, and union strategy and tactics. This launch event will discuss the contours of these debates and their relevance for revolutionaries today.Order a copy here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2689-the-founding-of-the-red-trade-union-internationalSpeakers:Reiner Tosstorff teaches at the history department at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and is author of The Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) 1920-1937. He has published monographs and articles on Spanish history as well as on the international workers’ movement in the twentieth century.Daria Dyakonova is a history researcher who teaches at the International University in Geneva, Switzerland. She is co-editor of The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922. Her Ph.D. thesis was on the Canadian Communist Youth and ties with the International Communist Movement during the interwar period.Mike Taber is editor of The Founding of the Red Trade Union International and is the current director of the Comintern Publishing Project. He has edited a number of volumes on the history of the international socialist and communist movement.This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Historical Materialism.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/Z0UOKR7W7osBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

David Camfield, a socialist scholar and author of Red Flags, and brian bean, a socialist organizer and author of Their End Is Our Beginning, engage in a thought-provoking discussion about the intersections of communism, abolition, and grassroots organizing. They explore the capitalist state's role and advocate for building counterpower. Both guests emphasize the need for community-driven alternatives to policing and share examples of successful self-organization globally. Their insights highlight the importance of relating everyday struggles to broader revolutionary aims.

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