
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

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 2, 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

Jan 23, 2023 • 1h 30min
Uprising In China: The Roots, Nature, and Trajectory of the Resistance
Join Spectre for a discussion of the roots of the uprising, the various struggles expressed in it, and its impact and possible trajectory.
An unprecedented, national wave of protests and labor actions have swept China. This Spectre Live panel moderated by David McNally and featuring Eli Friedman, Stephanie Wang, Rayhan Asat, and Tobita Chow will examine the roots of the uprising, the various struggles expressed in it, as well as its impact and possible trajectory.
Moderator:
David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston and director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism. McNally is the author of several books including Blood and Money, Global Slump, and Monsters of the Market.
Speakers:
Eli Friedman teaches in the department of International and Comparative Labor at Cornell University and is the author of The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia 2022). He is also the co-editor of The China Question: Toward Left Perspectives (Verso 2022).
Rayhan Asat is a Uyghur human rights advocate and Tom & Andi Bernstein Fellow at Yale Law School. Since 2020, she has led a public campaign for the release of her brother, Ekpar Asat, who has been held in the Xinjiang internment camp system since 2016, and on behalf of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China.
Stephanie Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at St. Lawrence University. Her work focuses on feminist political economy, labor, affect, NGO politics and queer studies. She is the author of “Unfinished Revolution: An Overview of Three Decades of LGBT Activism in China,” in Made in China Journal.
Tobita Chow is the founding Director of Justice Is Global, which organizes for a just and sustainable global economy and an end to right-wing nationalism. He is a leading progressive critic of the rise of great power conflict between the US and China and the threat this trend poses to progressive forces in both countries.
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This event is sponsored by Spectre and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/qTfVfWkdq34
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Jan 20, 2023 • 1h 11min
Freedom Dreams Episode 3 w/ Samora Pinderhughes, Robin D.G. Kelley
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The third discussion features Samora Pinderhughes.
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:
Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change and works in the tradition of the black surrealists, those who bend word, sound, and image towards the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes is a prison abolitionist and an advocate for process over product. His music is renowned for its emotionality, its honesty about difficult and vulnerable topics, and its careful details in word and sound.
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/gTCtienJ8LA
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Jan 17, 2023 • 1h 26min
Iranian Women Show the World How to Fight for Our Rights
Join an educational panel featuring Iranian activists and scholars for a discussion of the struggle in Iran and what we can learn from it.
Chanting “Women, Life, Freedom,” protests continue to sweep Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iranian police.
As our rights in the U.S. are threatened by the government, politicians and the courts, Iranian women and their allies are pointing the way forward to winning rights in far more difficult circumstances. They are fighting for self-determination and the right to control their lives free of outside intervention, including from the United States.
We in the United States have a lot to learn from people in other countries about how to preserve and expand our rights. We embrace the right of all to control their lives free of outside intervention, including from the United States.
Please join Chicago for Abortion Rights for an educational panel featuring Iranian activists and scholars for an exciting discussion about their struggle to win women's rights to control their own bodies and much more!
Speakers:
Mahshid Mir studied medicine in Tehran and after graduation moved to the US for her postdoc fellowship in cardiology at Harvard. Her residency training in internal medicine was at St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago. Mir is a healer in her day job and an activist in her volunteer time, finding the meaning of life in advocating for the right thing and devoting her life to improvement.
Dr. Zohreh Ghavamshahidi is a retired Iranian-American political science professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she was chair of the Women's Studies and Anthropology Departments, and taught courses in international relations and international law. A Fulbright Scholar, she has written extensively about the intersections of gender and religious identities in the Middle East and in the diaspora, and their relationships to state building and common stereotypes.
Roya Karbakhsh is an Iranian-born artist. Her work reflects the inner strength of women as captured through their eyes. As an observer and critic, her detailed works illuminate the feelings of repression and the desire for the collapse of the traditional ‘ways of life’ that are demanded in Iran. Roya’s paintings portray women from different levels of existence, and are brought together in scenes that seem to take place outside the normal perceptions of time. Her focus on the eyes show the spiritual power and the indomitable spirit that resides within the soul of all women. Karbakhsh works as a freelance artist and art teacher in Chicago and surrounding suburbs.
Moderator: Mandy Medley is a socialist feminist and a member of Chicago for Abortion Rights.
This event is sponsored by Chicago For Abortion Rights and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/T9EfOQ7hhVg
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Jan 11, 2023 • 1h 24min
Social Work, Abolition, and Palestine
Join us for a discussion of the need to center Palestine liberation as a transnational and abolitionist social work issue.
Join Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, PhD, Suhad Tabahi, PhD, and Stéphanie Wahab, PhD for an abolitionist discussion concerning the criminalization of Palestinians, dead and alive, in Palestine. Drs. Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Tabahi will offer a critical analysis of the current political moment, exposing the ways settler colonial criminalization operates to uproot, dispossess, dismember, and further oppress Palestinians.
They will also address the ethical concerns and moral imperatives for disrupting settler colonial violence enacted through criminalization, alongside the need to center Palestinian voices, epistemics, and practices within Palestinian liberation and solidarity work. Why Palestine matters and the intersectional struggle for justice and human rights will also be addressed.
Speakers:
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist, is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her scholarship focuses on knowledge production in relation to accumulative trauma, state criminality, surveillance, gender violence, and law and society. Author of: Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study, Security Theology; Surveillance and the Politics of Fear; Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding; co-edited volumes Engaged students in conflict zones, community-engaged courses in Israel as a vehicle for change; When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism; and is currently finalizing The Cunning of Gender Violence.
Suhad Tabahi is a proud first generation Palestinian American. She currently serves as Director and Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Dominican University, Illinois. She received her Masters from the University of Chicago in Social Service Administration and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago ( UIC). Her research focuses on anti- Muslim racism/ Islamophobia, International Social Work and Palestine, decolonizing social work curriculum, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in the Muslim community, and immigrant and refugees’ experiences and the role of transnationalism. She currently uses photovoice as a method of understanding the lived experiences of the Palestinian/Arab and Latinx communities navigating a post- Trump U.S. in the times of COVID. She has over 15 years’ experience in working with minoritized populations across the Chicagoland area. She teaches across the curriculum in areas of practice, policy, research, and diversity.
This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), Social Workers for Palestine, and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/K2F0ZszqLb0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Jan 10, 2023 • 1h 30min
Cherríe Moraga’s Portrait of Queer Motherhood
Join Cherríe Moraga and Martha Gonzalez for a conversation in celebration of the 25th Anniversary Edition of Moraga’s classic Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood.
In a series of journal entries—some original passages, others revisited and expanded in retrospect—Cherrié Moraga details her experiences with pregnancy, birth, and the early years of lesbian parenting.
With the premature birth of her son—when HIV-related mortality rates were at their highest—Moraga, a new mother at 40-years-old, was forced to confront the fragile volatility of life and death; in these recorded dreams and reflections, her terror and resilience are made palpable. The particular challenges of queer parenting prove transformative as Moraga navigates her intersecting roles as Chicana mother, child, lover, friend, artist, activist, and more.
With an updated introduction and other additions, including an afterword by Rafael Angel Moraga, this revised 25th anniversary edition of Waiting in the Wings is thoughtful and emotive, with prose that is sharp and beautifully written, from the voice of a beloved and incomparable writer.
Get the book from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1933-waiting-in-the-wings
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Speakers:
Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright whose professional life began in 1981 with her co-editorship of the groundbreaking feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of several collections of her own writings, including A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Native Country of the Heart, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood, and also forthcoming from Haymarket in 2023, Loving in the War Years and Other Writings 1978-1998.
Martha Gonzalez is a Chicana artivista (artist/activist) musician, feminist music theorist and Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Scripps/Claremont College. A Fulbright (2007-2008), Ford (2012-2013), Woodrow Wilson (2016-2017), and MacArthur Foundation Fellow (2022), her academic interests have been fueled by her own musicianship as a singer/songwriter and percussionist for Grammy Award (2013) winning band Quetzal.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/B9A3o70Fie8
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Jan 10, 2023 • 45min
Super Sad Black Girl w/ Diamon Sharp, Eve Ewing, Jamila Woods, Raych Jackson
Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free?Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.Join us for this livestream of the in-person book launch event for Super Sad Black Girl with Diamond Sharp, Eve Ewing, Raych Jackson and Jamila Woods.
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Speakers:
Diamond Sharp is a poet and essayist from Chicago. Super Sad Black Girl is her debut collection of poems.
Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, and most recently a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and performer. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube. She is the 2017 NUPIC Champion and a 2017 Pink Door fellow. Jackson recently voiced 'DJ Raych' in the Jackbox game, Mad Verse City. She voices Tiffany in Battu, an upcoming animation recently picked up by Cartoon Network. Her latest play, “Emotions & Bots”, premiered at the Woerdz Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Jamila Woods is a Chicago-bred singer/songwriter and award-winning poet whose inspirations include Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Morrison. Following the 2016 release of her debut album HEAVN, Woods received critical acclaim for her singular sound that is both rooted in soul and wholly modern. Her 2019 sophomore release LEGACY! LEGACY! featured 12 tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced her life and work. She is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and co-editor of BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic (2018).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/W_yl0SZR050
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks