Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

On February 28, 1993, agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) raided the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. Acting on reports that the group and their leader, David Koresh, were stockpiling illegal weapons, the AFT raid led to a disastrous siege that ended with a lethal fire and the deaths of 76 people, including 25 children. 30 years later, bestselling author and former investigative reporter Jeff Guinn offers a fresh account of the siege at the Branch Davidian compound, featuring never-before-seen documents, photographs, and interviews. In Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage, Guinn's extensive research captures the voices of a dozen former ATF agents who participated in the initial raids, who speak on the record about the poor decisions of their commanders that led to this deadly confrontation. Why did the FBI choose to end the siege with the use of CS gas? How did ATF and FBI officials try, and fail, to cover up their agencies' mistakes? Where did David Koresh plagiarize his infamous prophecies? What are the direct links between the Branch Davidian tragedy and the modern militia movement in America? Guinn considers these questions and more, shedding new light on a story that we thought we knew. Jeff Guinn is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Go Down Together, The Last Gunfight, Manson, War on the Border, and Waco. He was the co-executive producer alongside Leonardo DiCaprio on the TV docuseries Terror in the Jungle, which is based on his book, The Road to Jonestown. He is a two-time Edgar finalist for True Crime and a two-time winner of the Texas Book Award. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage The Elliott Bay Book Company

The Black Power movement is often associated with iconic spokespeople, but its momentum was due, in part, to the work of those with untold stories. University of Washington-Bothell Professor and historian Dan Berger's new book Stayed On Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family's Journey focuses on the story of Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons: two unheralded, grassroots Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. A love story as well as a movement story, Zoharah and Michael fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that first traversed the United States and then the world. In centering their lives through intertwined stories, Berger shows how Black Power brought unity on both a local and global scale, which had an impact across organizations as well as generations. Attendees will likely learn something new about these unsung members of the movement toward civil rights, introducing people besides those typically highlighted during Black History Month. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom seeks to reveal a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to forge a life for themselves while working to make a better world for others. Dan Berger is professor of comparative ethnic studies and associate dean for faculty development and scholarship in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. His book Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize. He lives in Seattle, WA. Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president & CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. For more than 20 years, she has worked with foundations, financial institutions, and nonprofits to improve the lives of working people across the country. Dr. Rojas holds a Ph.D. in City & Regional Planning from UC Berkeley, and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007. Stayed on Freedom The Elliott Bay Book Company

Do you recall your earliest memories about managing money? Did you squirrel away pennies in a bank or watch your parents balance the checkbook? Author Tori Dunlap had those memories as a child and was always good with money, but she learned her experience was unusual — especially among her female friends. After investigating financial literacy and wealth gaps, Dunlap discovered that girls are significantly less likely to receive a holistic financial education and receive radically different messages about money than boys. Women, she contends, are often taught to restrain their spending, while men are taught to invest and are rewarded for pursuing wealth. And when something like, say, a global pandemic happens, women tend to be the first to leave the workforce or experience job cuts, and are the last to re-enter it. With such disparate outcomes, it's no wonder money is a source of anxiety and a barrier to equality for so many. In her new book, Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love, Dunlap aims to help women exercise agency over their finances and lives. Through journaling prompts, deep-dives into the financial landscape, and interviews with financial experts on everything money — from predatory credit card companies to the racial wealth gap and voting with your dollars — Financial Feminist strives to help women be free to live the lives they want. Dunlap joins us at Town Hall to share her approach to paying off debt, spending mindfully, saving money without deprivation, and investing for the future. Tori Dunlap is a globally-recognized money and career expert whose work has been featured on Good Morning America, the TODAY Show, the New York Times, People, TIME, Forbes, CNBC, and more. After spending years building Her First $100K on the side of her 9-5 job in marketing, she has turned it into a multi-seven-figure business that changes women's lives, helping them gain control over their careers and finances. Financial Feminist is her first book. Aleenah Ansari is equal parts storyteller, creative problem solver, and journalist at heart who's rooted in the stories of people behind products, companies, and initiatives. She's written about travel, entrepreneurship, mental health, and wellness, and has representation in media for Insider, The Seattle Times, Byrdie, and more. You can usually find her searching for murals, making an oat vanilla latte, and planning her next trip to New York. You can learn more at aleenahansari.com. Financial Feminist Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love The Elliott Bay Book Company

By the time food politics expert Marion Nestle obtained her doctorate in molecular biology, she had been married since the age of nineteen, dropped out of college, worked as a lab technician, divorced, and become a stay-at-home mom with two children. That's when she got started. In her new memoir, Slow Cooked, Nestle reflects on how she achieved late-in-life success as a leading advocate for healthier and more sustainable diets. Recounting how she built an unparalleled career at a time when few women worked in the sciences, she shares how she came to recognize and reveal the enormous influence of the food industry on our dietary choices. Slow Cooked charts her astonishing rise from bench scientist to the pinnacles of academia, as she overcame the barriers and biases facing women of her generation and found her life's purpose after age fifty. Nestle's personal story is sure to be deeply relevant to everyone who eats, and anyone who thinks it's too late to follow a passion. Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University and author of a wide range of books about the politics of food, nutrition, health, and the environment. Jim Krieger, MD, MPH is Executive Director of Healthy Food America and Clinical Professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health. He previously worked for 25 years at Public Health – Seattle & King County as Chief of Chronic Disease Prevention. Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics Third Place Books

Over 49 million children attend public school in the United States, with over 52,000 of them here in our Seattle Public Schools alone. The U.S. public school system guarantees every child in every city, town, and rural area in the country, a warm, safe place to grow and learn. While public schools in the U.S. have been around for well over 150 years, the onset of COVID-19 dramatically interrupted this long-standing institution. Tens of millions of students lost vital support — not just classes, but food, heat, and physical and emotional safety. The cost was enormous. But this crisis began much earlier than 2020, argues Anya Kamenetz, a longtime education correspondent for NPR. In her recent book, The Stolen Year, she exposes long-running shortcomings that led to the plight of children and families in American life. Kamenetz follows families across the country as they live through the pandemic, facing loss and resilience: a boy with autism in San Francisco who gains a foster brother, and a Hispanic family in Texas that loses a member to COVID, and finds solace when they need it most. Kamenetz also explores how we got to this point: how the U.S. thrusts children and caregivers into poverty, over-polices families of color, and relies on mothers instead of on infrastructure. She believes that the government, in failing to support children through this tumultuous time, has stolen years of their lives, and calls for a national reckoning to put children at the center of decision-making. While the pandemic may have disrupted our public school system, Kamenetz maintains hope that it can be the beginning of a much better future for children and their families. Anya Kamenetz has covered education for many years, including for NPR, where she also co-created the podcast Life Kit: Parenting in partnership with Sesame Workshop. Kamenetz is the winner of numerous awards, including the National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association (2009, 2010, and 2015), an Edward R. Murrow Award for innovation, along with the rest of the NPR Ed team (2017), the AERA Excellence in Media Reporting on Education Research Award (2022), and several others. Kamenetz is the author of several acclaimed nonfiction books: Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006); The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, But You Don't Have To Be (Public Affairs, 2016); and The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life (Public Affairs, 2018), and others. She has appeared in several documentaries and is a frequent speaker on topics related to children, learning and technology. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. Bonnie J. Rough is a Seattle-based author, journalist, and parent educator whose most recent book is Beyond Birds & Bees: Bringing Home a New Message to Our Kids about Sex, Love, and Equality, a groundbreaking inquiry into how we teach our children about bodies, sex, relationships, and equality. Inspired by modern lessons from the world-famous Dutch approach, Bonnie's work on topics such as teaching consent, raising kids without sexual shame, LGBTQ+ allyship, childhood crushes, and how comprehensive sex ed underpins social justice has appeared in numerous media outlets including NPR, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Salon, and KUOW Seattle. Explore at www.bonniejrough.com.6 The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now (Hardcover) Third Place Books

Are you are frustrated with the political dysfunction our country is experiencing? From unresponsive and unrepresentative government that fails to tackle our largest problems, to extremists undermining free and fair elections, it is easy to be very pessimistic about our country and its politics. There is a way forward. Please join Joshua Graham Lynn, co-founder and CEO of RepresentUs, who will take you through a fast-paced presentation that lays out how critical this moment is for our future, and what can be done to preserve the sanctity of our elections, restore American democracy, and protect our nation for future generations. Josh will outline a promising effort to help ensure that every vote is cast and counted, extremism is thwarted, sanity returns to our political process, and how you can help. Get excited and intrigued by what you hear and leave the evening with a sense of hope. RepresentUs is a strictly nonpartisan, highly effective group with a winning track record building the movement to make transformative changes to our political system, and protect our democracy.

It can be said that the lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people's minds in order to change things. But what happens when people increasingly write one another off instead of seeking to win one another over? Journalist and Town Hall alumni Anand Giridharadas contends that America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Debates are framed in moralistic terms, with enemies battling the righteous. Movements for justice are building barriers to entry instead of on-ramps, he argues, and political parties are focusing on the mobilization of the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical. In Giridharadas' new book The Persuaders, he takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. He introduces us to a leader of Black Lives Matter; a trailblazer in the feminist resistance to Trumpism; white parents at a seminar on raising adopted children of color; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a team of door knockers with an uncanny formula for changing minds on immigration; an ex-cult member turned QAnon deprogrammer; and Russian operatives clandestinely stoking Americans' fatalism about one another. As the book's subjects grapple with how to call out threats and injustices while calling in those who don't agree with them (but one day, just might), they point a way to healing — and changing — a fracturing country. Anand Giridharadas is the author of the international best-seller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University's Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Naomi Ishisaka is the Assistant Managing Editor for Diversity and Inclusion and the Social Justice Columnist for The Seattle Times. She is an award-winning journalist and photographer who focuses on racial equity and social justice. Her writing and photography have appeared in The Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, City Arts, ColorsNW Magazine, Seattle Globalist, South Seattle Emerald and other publications. Ishisaka is a frequent speaker at media workshops and community events, and is on the board of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) Seattle chapter. The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (Hardcover) Elliott Bay Books

Can the choices you make on a daily basis transform society? Sociologist and Princeton professor Dr. Ruha Benjamin thinks so, and has the research to support the idea. Dr. Benjamin's groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice spanned years and focused primarily on larger, structural changes. But the scourges of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired Dr. Benjamin to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Her new book Viral Justice offers a sweeping, deeply personal exploration of how we can shape our world through the choices we make on a daily basis. Part memoir, part manifesto, Dr. Benjamin vividly recounts her personal experiences and those of her family, showing how decisions that might otherwise go unnoticed can have great impact — even on an exponential scale. Through stories about her father's premature death, her brother's experience with the criminal justice system, and her own challenges as a young mother navigating an inequitable healthcare system, Dr. Benjamin shines a light on both the devastating impacts of chronic racism and the passions and strengths of communities driven to demand justice. Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a powerful and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming people's relationships and communities while inspiring them to build a more just and joyful world. Ruha Benjamin is an internationally recognized writer, speaker, and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She is the award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and editor of Captivating Technology, among many other publications. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The Root, and The Guardian. Vivian Phillips, Founder and President of the non-profit organization ARTE NOIR, is a communications professional and arts leader. Vivian's professional history includes service as the Director of Communications for a Seattle Mayor, Director of Marketing and Communications for Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle University Adjunct Professor (MFA Arts Leadership), television, radio, and live performance producing, public speaking, and numerous arts and strategic communications projects. She served as the Chair for both the Seattle Arts Commission and 4Culture, and co-founded The Hansberry Project and the Historic Central Area Arts and Cultural District. Jazmyn Scott, ARTE NOIR Executive Director, comes to Arte Noir as a long-time advisor and community organizer. For the past six years, she led programming and community partnerships for LANGSTON Seattle, where she was the organization's first employee. Her leadership at LANGSTON catalyzed the development of new programs that engaged a wide range of local and national performing artists. Jazmyn is also the co-curator of 50 NEXT: Seattle Hip-Hop Worldwide interactive experience, which includes music from Seattle and Northwest Hip-Hop artists displayed at the Museum of History and Industry. Jazmyn's community connections are extensive, and she currently serves as board vice president for Earshot Jazz and The Residency and sits on several community arts advisory boards. Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Hardcover) Third Place Books

What is it like to be the mouthpiece for the President of the United States? You or I may have found ourselves stressed about writing an essay or sending a letter, but imagine having to craft sentences that the entire nation — and much of the world — will hear. Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America is the latest release by Cody Keenan, Barack Obama's chief speechwriter. The book features an account of what were arguably the ten most dramatic days of the presidency: the Charleston church massacre, the fate of marriage equality, the outcome of the controversial Affordable Care Act, to name a few. In response to these events, Keenan composed a series of speeches in rapid succession to contend with these and other challenges — all while facing additional pressures to consistently please the POTUS with his writing. Grace explores not only the political, but the personal as it paints an intimate picture of White House insiders like Valerie Jarrett, Ben Rhodes, Jen Psaki, as well as the speechwriting team who worked together during this historic stretch during the Obama administration. The writing takes readers behind the scenes, revealing personal details and retracing the rhetorical tightrope walked by the first Black president, culminating with the unforgettable and unprecedented: President Obama's stunning act as he took a deep breath and led the country in a chorus of Amazing Grace. This event will be a testament to the power of words: how they help shape the character of our country, and how they are capable of bringing a nation together — or tearing it apart. Born and raised in Chicago, Cody Keenan rose from a campaign intern in his hometown to become chief speechwriter at the White House and Barack Obama's post-presidential collaborator. A sought-after expert on politics, messaging, and current affairs, he is now a partner at leading speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and teaches a popular course on political speechwriting to undergraduates at his alma mater Northwestern University. Cody lives in New York City with his wife Kristen and their baby daughter Grace. Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald and a columnist with The Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance and complexity with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. Marcus was the Northwest African American Museum's inaugural James Baldwin Circle Fellow in 2022, honored by the King County Library System Foundation as a Literary Lion, and awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions' Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020. Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (Hardcover) Third Place Books

It was in 2002 that Robin D.G. Kelley published Freedom Dreams, a history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora throughout the twentieth century. The book presented a premise that the catalyst for political engagement is not oppression or misery, but hope. From Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, to Paul Robeson and Malcolm X, to Jayne Cortez, the book unearthed histories of these and other Black radicals who dared to dream of a brighter future. It tackled topics such as surrealism, Communism, and feminism and was replete with examples on how these and other movements and mindsets intersected with the Black experience. Two decades later, the work remains a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Town Hall welcomes Kelley as he marks the 20th anniversary of Freedom Dreams with a 2022 edition, complete with a foreword by poet and activist Aja Monet, as well as updated reflections. A new introduction highlights Kelley's expanded worldview and broadened vision of freedom that includes disability justice, abolition, decolonization, and mutual care. Likewise, a new epilogue explores the visionary organizing of those he deems today's freedom dreamers. This classic history of the power of the Black radical imagination, its underpinnings and offshoots, remains as fitting for the present as it was at the time of its initial publication. Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at UCLA. He is author or co-editor of numerous award-winning books, including Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, among others. Reagan Jackson is a multi-genre writer, artist, activist, and international educator with an abiding love of justice, art, spirituality, and creating community. She is the Co-Executive Director of Young Women Empowered. She is also the co-host and producer of the Deep End Friends Podcast and the cofounder of Blackout Healing. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination Estelita's Library