Haymarket Books Live
Haymarket Books
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.
Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Apr 13, 2023 • 1h 25min
Getting to the Root: Unpacking and Dismantling the Family Policing System
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

Apr 12, 2023 • 1h 29min
Russia Out! Solidarity with the Ukrainian Resistance
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

Apr 11, 2023 • 1h 23min
Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War
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
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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

Apr 10, 2023 • 1h 12min
Freedom Dreams Episode 5 with Harsha Walia & Robin D.G. Kelley
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.
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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

Apr 6, 2023 • 1h 20min
The Great Escape: Saket Soni and Naomi Klein In Conversation
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.
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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
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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

Mar 8, 2023 • 1h 28min
A Spectre Haunting: China Miéville on the Communist Manifesto
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.
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Get A Spectre, Haunting from Haymarket Books:
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1990-a-spectre-haunting
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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

Mar 7, 2023 • 1h 34min
No Winners in Nuclear War: Nuclear Power & the Military Industrial Complex
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

Mar 3, 2023 • 1h 17min
Freedom Dreams Episode 4 with Elleza Kelley & Robin D.G. Kelley
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

Mar 3, 2023 • 1h 15min
American Sex Tape (poetry book launch)w/ Jameka Williams & Kemi Alabi
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.
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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

Feb 22, 2023 • 1h 29min
On The Line: A Conversation on Class, Solidarity, and Building a Union
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.
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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
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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


