Haymarket Books Live

Join Dean Spade & organizers from Atlanta as they discuss how to protect our communities against recent threats to mutual aid & solidarity efforts. This event took place on August 17, 2023. In the last year, we’ve seen attempts to criminalize mutual aid become more common as an authoritarian tactic. The recent attacks on mutual aid organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund brought into full view how charging, surveillance, and targeted criminalization are an ongoing strategy to shut down political movements and community organizing. In this session, we'll be reviewing how media, right-wing movements, and even supposed allies have often latched onto incorrect and spurious claims about non-profit finances, community organizing structures, and basic accounting practices in attempts to stop the solidarity of mutual aid. Join organizer Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), along with Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders, Zohra Ahmed from the University of GA School of Law, plus organizers from the National Bail Fund Network and the Yellowhammer Fund, to discuss the threats organizers are facing and how we protect each other and social justice organizing. This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Community Justice Exchange. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/M3qvIHdZ73E Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

The past few years have brought a huge resurgence in labor organizing across the U.S.—efforts which, from Chris Smalls’ founding of the Amazon Labor Union to Cecily Myart-Cruz’s work as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, have been driven in large part by members of the Black working class. In award-winning historian Blair LM Kelley’s BLACK FOLK, she shows conclusively that this legacy of Black labor organizing stretches back to before Emancipation. Highlighting the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers whose established networks of resistance are still alive today, her narrative treats Black workers not just as laborers or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered in their own right. This event took place on July 27, 2023. Kelley demonstrates that the church yards, factory floors, railcars, and postal sorting facilities where Black people worked were sites of possibility, and, as she suggests, Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes could be the same today. BLACK FOLK is thus not just an epic of American history writ large—it’s a vision, too, of our possible future. For this virtual launch event, Kelley will be joined by Robin D.G. Kelley. Get a copy of BLACK FOLK: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978163149... Blair LM Kelley is the director of the Center for the Study of the American South and codirector of the Southern Futures initiative at the University of North Carolina. Her first book, Right to Ride, won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her writing of Black Folk. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBv1CGteQLc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today. This event took place on July 19, 2023. Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Most recently, legislatures across the country have moved to ban Black Studies from curricula, while the right mobilizes outrage against librarians and educators. These attacks come in the context of a backlash against the popular 2020 uprising against racism and police violence, and are being amplified in the halls of power from Congress to the Supreme Court. Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley, co-editors with Colin Kaepernick of the new book Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, for a wide-ranging conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today, from the classroom to the streets. Speakers: 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. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the 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 is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. 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. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/K6MLtFeZcak Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join trans theorists and activists for a discussion of how "Transgender Marxism” can explain the backlash and help guide the resistance. This event took place on July 16, 2023. The right has launched a systematic backlash against trans people. It has introduced hundreds of anti-trans bills in statehouses across the US, ramped up attacks on trans people around the world in courts and legal systems, and waged a campaign of escalating vigilante violence. Now is the time for analyzing why the right is focused on trans people as primary targets of class war from above. And now is the time for organized efforts at building broad solidarity with trans people to fight back. Join frontline trans theorists and activists for a discussion of how “Transgender Marxism” can explain the backlash and help guide the resistance. Speakers: Jules Gleeson is a writer, comedian and all-around communist menace. Her work has been featured in publications and live events worldwide. She was an editor of Transgender Marxism (2021) and is currently writing her own book on intersex liberation's origin story in the 1990s. Sandow “Sandy” Sinai is a writer, musician, teacher, and communist living in Brooklyn, New York. She loves the bass guitar, psychoanalysis, and the dialectic. Kade Doyle Griffiths is a writer and anthropologist teaching at Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is an editor of Spectre Journal and has also written for The Nation,In These Times, and Historical Materialism. Chair: Vanessa Wills is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. She specializes in moral, social, and political philosophy, nineteenth century German philosophy (especially Karl Marx), and the philosophy of race. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/yHjQvjOQoe4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

In their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival. This event took place on July 6, 2023. “I’ve decided I can’t trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community. Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods. Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood. Get Because You Were Mine from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... Speakers: Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021), which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017). Janae is the recipient of the St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook Alum, a proud Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Their poetry has been published in Best American Poetry (2022), Ploughshares, the American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, the Sun Magazine, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Janae is the co-host of the podcast The Slave is Gone. Off the page they go by Breezy. Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published through Write Bloody Press. Flame is a recipient of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture's CityArtist grant and served as Hugo House's 2017-2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry. Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, PANK, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, and elsewhere. She is recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, and 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency. JR Mahung is a Belizean-American poet from the South Side of Chicago and one half of the Poetry duo Black Plantains with Malcolm Friend. They teach, write, and study in Amherst, MA. JR is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2017 Emerging Poet’s Incubator Fellow, and the 2018 Individual World Poetry Slam representative for the Boston Poetry Slam. Tweet them about rice and beans @jr_mahung. Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine, editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/oQzdrRc6y7k Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Nisrin Elamin, Raga Makawi, and Hamid Khalafallah recount the history of the 2018 Sudanese Revolution and explain the current conflict. This event took place on July 5, 2023. Spectre Live Presents: Counterrevolution in Sudan: Understanding the Causes of the Current War Sudan is wracked by war between dueling military factions. Nisrin Elamin, Raga Makawi, and Hamid Khalafallah will recount the history of the 2018 Sudanese Revolution and explain how the military’s counterrevolution caused the current war. They will also show how people have survived the conflict and explore the prospects for revolutionary forces to regroup in its aftermath and renew the struggle for democracy, justice, and equality. Introduction by Shireen Akram-Boshar Nisrin Elamin is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Stratified Enclosures: Land, Capital and Empire-making in Central Sudan and has written for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Okay Africa, and The Egypt Independent. Raga Makawi is a Sudanese editor and researcher currently based in the UK. Hamid Khalafallah is a former Nonresident Fellow at TIMEP focusing on inclusive governance and mobilization in Sudan and is working as a Program Officer for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), supporting Sudan’s democratic transition. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWgBDhTKawE Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Three acclaimed poets with new books in multiple genres take on questions of history, trauma, and family in the Americas. This event took place on June 9, 2023. To celebrate the publication of Julie Carr’s Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, May 2023), she will be joined by award winning authors Cristina Rivera Garza, whose new book is Liliana’s Invincible Summer and Brandon Shimoda, whose forthcoming book is Hydra Medusa for a joint reading and to discuss how family histories unearth the remains of patriarchal, settler-colonial, and white supremacist violence in the Americas. In Mud, Blood, and Ghosts, Julie Carr traces her own family’s history, and the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem – three-term Populist representative from Nebraska –through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism’s tendency toward racism and exclusion. Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. ​A book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of Cristina Rivera Garza’s quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today. Speakers: Julie Carr’s most recent books are Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West, Real Life: An Installation, Objects from a Borrowed Confession and the essay collection, Someone Shot My Book. She lives in Denver where she helps to run Counterpath and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the M. D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies, and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023). He is co-editing, with Brynn Saito, an anthology of poetry on Japanese American/Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025. Mary Sutton (moderator) is senior content editor for Academy of American Poets. Before joining the Academy, Mary was public humanities fellow at Library of America, where she worked with Kevin Young on African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song and the book’s companion website. Mary is currently also poetry editor at West Trade Review. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/MAOpEZ984qg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Alexa Patrick and special guests for a celebration of her debut poetry collection Remedies for Disappearing. This event took place on June 6, 2023. In this beautiful debut from an exciting new poet, Alexa Patrick’s Remedies for Disappearing memorializes Blackness in its quiet and unexpected forms, bringing the peripheral into focus. These poems muddy Black life and death, observe lineage and love stories, and question what “disappearing” teaches about Blackness and bodies. Remedies for Disappearing is gritty, sharp, and formally inventive, demonstrating Patrick’s imaginative curiosity, lyrical restraint, and confidence in her handling of language. Moments of aphoristic confession are balanced with imagistic precision as the speaker recounts the ways her aunties, sisters, and even herself have disappeared in order to survive. Patrick’s poetry is haunting and hopeful, striving to provide readers with the tools and context to acknowledge, define, and honor the complexity of Black girl/womanhood. Remedies for Disappearing connects Black girls and women to each other and to their own histories, and insists that they be fully and wholly seen. Get Remedies for Disappearing from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... Speakers: Alexa Patrick is a poet and vocalist from Connecticut. She is a Cave Canem fellow and Tin House alumna. She has also been cast in the featured role of Unsung in We Shall Not Be Moved, an opera under the direction of Bill T. Jones. You may find Alexa’s work published in The Quarry, The Rumpus, CRWN Magazine, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Raina León is a teacher, writer, artist, curator, scholar, and speaker. You might know her as a founding editor of The Acentos Review, the lead coordinator for Nomadic Press Philadelphia, the author of black god mother this body, and co-founder of StoryJoy, Inc. with Dr. Norma Thomas. She does lots of things and invites you to dream with her sometime. Jasmine Mans is a Black poet and performance artist from Newark, New Jersey. Jasmine’s poetry book, BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME has been named one of Oprah’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books and a TIME Magazine Must Read, to name a few; and Jasmine herself named as Essence’s #1 Contemporary Black Poet to Know. Jasmine most recently collaborated with the Brooklyn Ballet on an original performance piece titled Unnatural Surrounding at the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music. Gabriel Ramirez, a Queer Afro-Latinx poet and teaching artist has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo, Miami Book Fair, and a participant in the Callaloo Writers Workshops. You can find his work in publications like The Volta, Split This Rock, VINYL, Acentos Review as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Kush Thompson, author of A Church Beneath the Bulldozer (2014), is a Chicago-born poet, painter, archivist, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Voted runner-up best local poet of 2014 by The Chicago Reader, a 2015 Young Futurist by The Root, and a 2017 Pink Door & Luminarts Creative Writing Fellow, Thompson's contributed over a decade of performances and creative writing workshops, both nationally and internationally. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/naG3oOfqw6g Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a conversation on the seedy underside to Tech’s past, present, and future. This event took place on May 30, 2023. If the industry’s most credulous boosters are to be taken at their word, the contemporary tech industry is an economic freight train driven by big-brained disrupters who are charting a path toward a future of mutual prosperity, boundless leisure, and unfettered innovation. But in recent years some of the luster has come off of Tech’s carefully crafted reputation—thanks to stories of self-combusting cars, high-profile fraud convictions, and other headline grabbing fiascos. Just how much bluff and bluster, not to mention skeletons, lay buried beneath Silicon Valley’s idyllic hills? And what does a future without cheap credit and greatly diminished credibility mean for the tech industry? For this event, Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World will be conversation with Timnit Gebru, found and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge. Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/ayLtwiP0uoo?feature=share Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a book launch, poetry reading, and visual showcase of Por Siempre. This event took place on May 17, 2023. Por Siempre is a visual and verbal narrative of the grit and gentleness in Southwestern Latinx communities told through photography by Antonio Salazar and poetry by José Olivarez. Guns, tattoos, pit bulls, and cars appear alongside a tender aubade, a couple holding hands, a baby bathing in a kitchen sink; landscapes and skylines in Phoenix and Los Angeles show palm trees and messy garages; long white socks and acrylic nails of younger generations meet the smiles and traditions of elders. In a society that would rather disappear or ignore its own grittier dimensions, Salazar’s work is both a refusal to be silenced and a love letter to the communities that sing, dance, live, and love, in their own beautiful and dangerous ways. Alongside Salazar’s powerful visual narrative, a series of poetry by José Olivarez appears throughout the book. Each poem “speaks” in its own way—to, of, with, and beyond the subjects of Salazar’s photos—with humor, honesty, and compassion. These artists together in Por Siempre are a force: expanding and lifting each other’s best parts, as those in sincere and caring communities often do. Order a Copy of Por Siempre: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/... ———————————————————————————————————————————————— Speakers: Isela Meraz (Chela) is a self-taught community artist, she was born in Durango Mexico “Tierra de Los Alacranes” and has lived in Phoenix, AZ since 1991. The love for her community and social justice has led her to participate in civil disobedience, hunger strikes and spiritual fast. Creating art that honors her family, queerness and land. Her work is now part of the permanent collection of the ASU Art Museum and it is currently on display till July of 2023. José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by the Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he coedited the poetry anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. He cohosts the poetry podcast The Poetry Gods. Antonio Salazar is a photographer based in Phoenix, Arizona. His work features a glimpse into the culture of the fifth largest city in the U.S. Themes surrounding Chicane/x identity in the Southwest are heavily explored through his art. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/dfXwiCOL5zg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks