
Haymarket Books Live
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.
Latest episodes

Jan 5, 2023 • 1h 28min
Freedom Dreams Episode 2 with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor & Robin D.G. Kelley
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

Dec 5, 2022 • 57min
On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century
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

Dec 1, 2022 • 1h
Fight Like Hell: A Tribute to Mike Davis, with Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Geri Silva
¡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

Nov 30, 2022 • 1h 28min
On Political Violence: Fascist Mobilization & Queer and Trans Self-Defense
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.

Nov 29, 2022 • 1h 11min
Freedom Dreams Episode 1 with aja monet & Robin D.G. Kelley
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

51 snips
Nov 29, 2022 • 1h 54min
The Role of the State in Abolitionist Futures
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 Uprisings, abolitionist organizers are increasingly grappling with questions around the role of the state in abolitionist futures. Where do we want funds diverted from police budgets to go: into other institutions currently controlled by the carceral state, to subsidize the creation of new state entities, or into community-based organizations? What actions and behaviors do we think should be regulated by the state? How should they be regulated? How do we think resources should be distributed? These are not just theoretical questions - they shape the sites of struggle we choose, our organizing objectives and strategies, and the contexts in which they unfold.
Organizers Robyn Maynard, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explore these questions and more through Black feminist and Indigenous frameworks in their recently released books No More Police: A Case for Abolition and Rehearsals for Living.
Get a copy of No More Police: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781620977323
Get a copy of Rehearsals for Living: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1880-rehearsals-for-living
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Speakers:
Robyn Maynard is an award-winning Black feminist scholar-activist based in Toronto and the author of the national bestseller Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Her writings on policing, feminism, abolition, and Black liberation are taught widely across North America and Europe.
Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant police misconduct attorney and organizer whose writing, litigation, and advocacy have focused on the policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color for the past two decades. She is the co-founder of, most recently, Interrupting Criminalization and the author of many books, including "Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color" (Beacon Press 2017).
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/tqaz90hfGhk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Nov 29, 2022 • 1h 3min
Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win with Helen Shiller and Laura Washington
Join Helen Shiller and Laura Washington as they discuss Shiller's new biography, Daring to Struggle Daring to Win.
Helen Shiller went from radical anti-war activist in Wisconsin, to a member of a collective of white allies of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, to an elected city council person who helped break the back of the racialized opposition to Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor.
Shiller participated, when few others did, in the historic fight against the gentrification of a unique economically and racially mixed Chicago community on the Northside. With insight into historic community organizing and political battles in Chicago from the 1970s through 2010, this book details numerous policy fights and conflicts in Chicago during this time, illuminating recurrent political themes and battles that remain relevant to this day.
Join us for a limited-capacity in-person book launch event and discussion with Helen Shiller and Laura Washington about the struggle for justice then and now in Chicago.
Masks and proof of vaccination are required for those attending in person. For those attending in-person doors will open at 6 PM.
The event will also be livestreamed for those unable to attend in-person. Closed captioning will be available for the livestream.
Order your copy of Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1952-daring-to-struggle-daring-to-win
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Speakers:
Helen Shiller, raised by migrant Jewish parents, was radicalized by the anti-war and civil rights movements. Shiller was in a collective of whites aligned with the Black Panther Party in Chicago. Beginning in 1987, Shiller was a radical Chicago alderperson for 24 years. She is the author of Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win.
Laura S. Washington is a Chicago Tribune contributing columnist and political analyst for ABC 7, Chicago’s ABC-owned station. She is the former editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter, served as deputy press secretary to Chicago Mayor Harold Washington. Her work and commentary has been widely featured in the national media, including Time Magazine, the Associated Press, New York Times, NBC Nightly News, MNSBC, PBS News Hour and the BBC. Washington is a frequent lecturer and moderator for local and national audiences. Twitter: @MediaDervish
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/03ReVPRb9Bc
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Nov 22, 2022 • 38min
Yes We Do Mean Smash the State: In Defense of Revolution
brian bean speaks at this session recorded at Socialism 2022. This session was sponsored by Rampant magazine.
https://rampantmag.com
Contemporary capitalism exploits and degrades human beings around the world, relying on the violent power of states to create profits, guarantee the functioning of markets, and cheapen labor through violence. There is no way to build a liberated future for all of us without overthrowing capitalism, and that will mean confronting and dismantling the capitalist state, its prisons, policing, borders, and military. It’s time we talk about smashing the state.
***Listen to all of the sessions from the Socialism 2022 conference by subscribing to the Socialism Conference podcast feed, wherever you get your podcasts.***
Listen on Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/soci…ce/id1648960830
Listen on Soundcloud: @socialismconf
Listen on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/38mBCw7Kwu0rkOKRARIfDk
Learn more about the Socialism Conference at www.socialismconference.org.
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 9, 2022 • 1h 32min
Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: Boston Female Liberation, 1968-1972
Join Boston Female Liberation members for a discussion about the group’s history, strategy, and legacy, as well as lessons for today.
Join us for a conversation celebrating the release of Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: Boston Female Liberation, 1968-1972 An Account By Participants.
Author Nancy Rosenstock together with Delpfine Welch, two of the women featured in the book who were members of Boston Female Liberation—a key radical feminist organization during the second wave of feminism, will provide an inside account of the group’s history, strategy and numerous activities from fighting to legalize abortion, to campaigning for free 24-hour childcare, to linking up with the anti-Vietnam War movement.
They will be joined by two members of Chicago for Abortion Rights, Lauren Bianchi and Gina Rozman-Wendle, to discuss the relevance of this history for today’s feminist movements.
Get a copy of "Inside the Second Wave": https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1887-inside-the-second-wave-of-feminism
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Fa6rvig5yVk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Nov 8, 2022 • 1h 23min
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