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Podcast Series

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.

Episodes

All Seasons Season 0
May 18, 2026

We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities

Join editors and contributors of We Are Each Other's Liberation, a major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

Get a copy of We Are Each Other's Liberation from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2519-we-are-each-other-s-liberation

Speakers:

Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.

Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.

TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organizer, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures. Pratibha is a published author and editor of of several anthologies. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and Sming Sming Books published, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar in 2025.

Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator working on issues of militarism for over 30 years. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, with Du Re Bang and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, its US group. She also hosts feminist radio program Women’s Magazine, broadcast on KPFA Berkeley California station of the Pacifica Radio network, and is known as DJ MOR Love and Joy, transnational feminist virtual dance party DJ.

Dr. Beverley Bryan is a lifelong educator and political activist, who is co-author of the classic book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) which detailed the experiences of Black women and their fight for equality from post-war up to 1980s Britain. Dr. Bryan was a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD); a Saturday school organiser, a mainstream primary school teacher who pioneered Black history teaching in her classroom in the 1970s and a member of the British Black Panther Movement. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bryan is a retired Professor of Language Education from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

May 18, 2026

Ukraine’s Anti-Imperialist Struggle

February 24th marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Right now, it is bombing the country’s energy system, cutting off heat and electricity for millions in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to bully Ukraine into a land for peace settlement that rewards Putin’s aggression and, with the willing collaboration of Ukraine’s oligarchs, puts the country up for sale to Western multinationals. Join this webinar to hear about Ukraine’s struggle.

Speakers:

Artem Chapeye is the author of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Guns (Washington Post 2025 best non-fiction) and The Ukraine. He is a writer, translator, activist, and, after the 2022 invasion, an enlisted member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine .

Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, Vermont State Senator, member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, and also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Denys Bondar is a native of Ukraine and an associate professor of physics at Tulane University as well as a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.

May 6, 2026

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor

Join us for a discussion between author Andrew Stone Higgins and historian Nelson Lichtenstein on the new book From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists.

Founded at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a radical civil rights group, lit the spark of the Free Speech Movement that same year, and its members and successor organizations would go on to play an outsized role in shaping the course of both the Black freedom struggle and the rank-and-file labor insurgency of the 1970s.

Following their success in the Bay Area, the ISC launched chapters across the country, and in 1969 became the International Socialists, with much of its growing membership relocating to the Midwest to take industrial jobs in the auto, steel, communications, and trucking industries. In their final years, among other important efforts, the IS created a majority-Black youth group known as the Red Tide, founded the seminal publication Labor Notes, and helped create Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor includes twenty-six original reflections by leading members—including renowned scholar-activists Nelson Lichtenstein and Nancy Holmstrom—offering invaluable insights into this influential but little-known organization.

Speakers:

Andrew Stone Higgins is the author of Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan, called "required reading for understanding the complex politics of race and higher education" by Daniel Martinez HoSang. He earned his PhD in U.S. history from the University of California at Davis.

Nelson Lichtenstein is a research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book is A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf2R1e2FM7I

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

May 5, 2026

Haymarket Presents: Thea Riofrancos on Extraction

Join us for this Haymarket Presents speakers series event, with Thea Riofrancos and activist-historian Gabriel Winant for a conversation on Riofrancos’s new book, Extraction. Co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books.

From the Los Angeles wildfires at the start of last year, to Trump’s recent televised summit with oil executives, evidence has continued to mount that the dominance of fossil fuels, and the catastrophic effects of climate change they continue to accelerate, is not going to be broken anytime soon. Yet the lithium industry is booming, and critical ‘green’ minerals continued to be on the frontlines of geopolitical wrangling. What are we to make of all this? Are we helping to solve the ecological crisis by buying electric cars if their construction necessitates opening hundreds of new mines in the next decade? If zero emission energy remains an urgent global need, how should we navigate these existential dilemmas? Thea Riofrancos and Gabriel Winant will grapple with these questions and consider what a path toward a just and effective green transition could look like.

Speakers:

Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Previously, she has been an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, as well as holding research positions at institutions in Santiago, Chile and Quito, Ecuador. The author of Resource Radicals and coauthor of A Planet to Win, her articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Cultural Studies, World Politics, and Global Environmental Politics, and her essays in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, n+1, and Jacobin, among other outlets.

Gabriel Winant is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, a member of the executive council of AAUP/AFT Local 6741, a member of the Dissent editorial board, and author of The Next Shift.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/8Mw5gu4LOas

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Dec 8, 2025

After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization

Join us as author Hamid Dabashi will be in conversation with Muhannad Ayyash as the two discuss Dabashi's latest book, After Savagery

As the death toll in Gaza continues to rise, what remains of the theories we use to understand our world? Join Hamid Dabashi and Dr. Muhannad Ayyash as they discuss and expose the racist roots of Western philosophy. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.

If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.

Get the book, After Savagery: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2607-after-savagery

Speakers:

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Among Dabashi’s recent books are On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past, The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West, and Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World.

Dr. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada where he is a Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel and A Hermeneutics of Violence, has co-edited two books, and is the author of over twenty journal articles and book chapters, and over fifty commentaries and opinion pieces.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/C1nXFhST1H4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Sep 16, 2025

Trouble! at Coal Creek

Join Austin Sauerbrei and Katey Lauer for a virtual launch of Trouble! at Coal Creek, a gripping graphic novel tells the story of the 1891 Coal Creek War.

Told through the eyes of a young Welsh immigrant, Trouble! at Coal Creek is the epic story of a cross-racial struggle to abolish the system of convict-leasing in the mines. Austin Sauerbrei's evocative black-and-white illustrations and masterful storytelling show the personal battles and motivations that led thousands of miners to repeatedly take up arms against the powerful companies, their militias, and politicians.

Lured by coal companies’ promises of good pay, stability, and opportunity, the narrator’s father brought their family across the Atlantic Ocean for work in the mine. The job, however, was deadly, and life grew unbearable as the coal companies immiserated miners and their families. Meanwhile, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, racist terror, and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan were still fresh memories for most. Coal companies relied increasingly on the forced labor of mostly Black prisoners who were loaned out from the state, an extremely profitable continuation of the old system of racist brutality. As Ida B. Wells noted at the time, "The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand."

The miners of Coal Creek, however, set fire to the edifice of convict-leasing and inspired similar rebellions throughout the South. In this captivating graphic novel, Saurbrei brings their overlooked story to life for new generations of organizers.

Order a copy of Trouble! at Coal Creek here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2529-trouble-at-coal-creek

Speakers:

Austin Sauerbrei is a community organizer and sequential artist based in Tennessee. He currently serves as the Director of Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), a 52-year-old, member-led organization dedicated to empowering Tennesseans in their efforts to have a greater voice in determining their own future. Austin spent years as a neighborhood and tenant organizer in Nashville, and then as the organizer for both the Chattanooga and Knoxville-Oak Ridge AFL-CIO Labor Councils. A lifelong comics enthusiast, Austin practices visual storytelling as a form of popular education. He and his wife, Claire Brown, live in Athens, Tennessee, with their three children.

Katey Lauer is an organizer, facilitator, and trainer in West Virginia, with a deep love of place. She has formed and led grassroots organizations in the Appalachian mountains for 15 years, as Coordinator of The Alliance for Appalachia, Lead Organizer of Appalachia Rising and The March on Blair Mountain, and founding Director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Architect of the WV Can’t Wait movement, Katey currently acts as Co-chair of this statewide formation that’s out to win a people’s government in the mountain state. Katey is also a Core Trainer Training for Change.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAXm-OMPRNo

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Sep 18, 2025

We Will Not Be Silenced: Embracing Palestinian liberation and Building Anti-Zionist Jewish Community

Join Global Jews for Palestine and Haymarket Books for a discussion on Palestinian liberation and building Anti-Zionist Jewish community.

Mission Statement:

We are Jews from many countries who are members of local, national and international networks and organizations. We are multi-ethnic and multigenerational and our members embrace a broad range of viewpoints on Jewish religious and ethical traditions. We are connected by our involvement in the struggle for Palestinian rights, and by our determination to work for justice. We oppose Zionism and all forms of racism and colonialism.

We believe that it is our particular responsibility to challenge Jewish organizations whose alliances and actions undermine Palestinian human and national rights, promote Jewish exceptionalism, and overturn Jewish social justice traditions. At the heart of our work is the fight for Palestinian liberation and the struggle for a world free of racial and ethnic hierarchy, colonial domination, and unbridled militarism.

Background:

Global Jews for Palestine initially came together to share our experiences of opposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism - a document that is being used to shield Israel from valid political challenge and to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights. Since our founding in 2019, we have come to recognize that our purpose is to be a powerful and effective global Jewish voice advocating for Palestinian liberation.

In the past year, as we have witnessed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and intensified ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, we are more committed than ever to making our voices heard and to standing together with the Palestinian people.

Moderator:

Marilyn Garson, Alternative Jewish Voices (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

Panelists:

Sheryl Nestel, Independent Jewish Voices (Canada)

Wieland Hoban, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Germany)

Iván Zeta, Judíes x Palestina (Argentina)

Closing:

Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian Physician

This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Global Jews for Palestine.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrmXSnmFLPU

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 6, 2025

When Silence Starves: An Evening of Literary Solidarity with Gaza

Join us for an evening of poetry and readings to raise money for vital mutual aid efforts in Gaza. As the zionist occupation - backed by the US, Britain and their allies - announces plans to openly ethnically cleanse and seize Gaza City, while forced starvation of Palestinians across Gaza rages on, we ask you to please donate what you can to provide food, water and essential supplies. These donations can save lives.

This event is organised by Books Against Borders, with collaboration from the White Kite Collective, Haymarket Books, and the long list of authors, poets and performers* who have contributed to this fundraiser.

Find more info and fundraiser links here: https://linktr.ee/booksagainstborders

Speakers:

Kamila Shamsie

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

White Kite Collective

Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso

Zainab Hasan

Sirine Saba

Heba Al-Agha

Julia Choucair-Vizoso

Emile Saba

Hossam Madhoun

Ruth Lass

Maxine Peake

Hanan Habashi

Zia Ahmed

Tom Branfoot

Lola Olufemi

Tasneim Zyada

lisa minerva luxx

Rachel Spence

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About the Fundraisers:

All funds raised will go to urgent fundraisers in Gaza. Half of ticket sales will go to Bridge of Solidarity, an anti-capitalist mutual aid organisation set up by Yazan, a young Gazan poet, challenging the genocide through mutual aid and the distribution of food, water, and funds. A quarter each of ticket sales will also go to fundraisers for friends in Gaza who are dependent on this money to support their families in the face of starvation, including our friends Iman and Raed. We will also be amplifying other projects and fundraisers here and throughout the event.


Bridge of Solidarity is an anti-capitalist mutual aid organization founded in Gaza by Yazan, in Al Mawasi, Khan Younis, focused on the most marginalized in Gaza most at risk of dying: people without phones, English skills, social media, wealthy relatives, outside support, and living relatives. You can donate directly to this fundraiser here: https://chuffed.org/project/bridgeofs...

Iman and her family, from her young niece and nephew to her elderly parents, have been displaced multiple times and had their homes and neighbourhood destroyed. We are raising money to support them to access basic needs and supplies in the face of starvation and serious health problems, and to raise funds for her and others in her family to evacuate when it is safe to do so. You can support Iman and her family directly here: https://gofund.me/c9689660

Raed and his family have narrowly survived multiple horrific attacks, including the Al-Ma’madani massacre and strikes that have taken the lives of relatives. Their home was destroyed and they have lost everything. This fundraiser is to support them access basic supplies, with food and other necessities at extreme prices and difficult to access. You can support Raed and his family directly here: https://chuffed.org/project/help-raed-in-gaza

We would also like to direct people to Shadows, an independent, non-profit artistic collective based in Gaza, established in 2020, and their ongoing campaign to develop a permanent children's performing arts club in Gaza. Please donate what you can to support this important work to foster expression, psychosocial support, and cultural resistance amongst communities in the Gaza strip. Support here: https://chuffed.org/project/134634-sh...

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/DFmcLVV52aw

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org”

Nov 6, 2025

Against the New McCarthyism: Organizing Resistance in Higher Education

The Trump regime took advantage of the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement under the Biden administration to launch a full-scale assault on higher education. He has unleashed ICE on student activists, branded any dissent against Israel’s genocidal war “antisemitic,” bullied universities into cancelling programs on race and gender, and defunded entire institutions. Join us for this Spectre Live panel of activist educators to discuss how to resist Trump’s New McCarthyism.

Speakers:

Isaac Kamola is a professor of political science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is author of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (2021) and Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (2019). He currently directs the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

Heba Gowayed is a writer and associate professor sociology at CUNY Hunter college and a current Carnegie Fellow. She is the author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (2022).

Vineeta Singh is a fellow at AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, an associate editor of Ethnic Studies Review, and a non-tenure track college teacher. She studies the history of US higher education as a site of racial contestation, so we can put contemporary confrontations about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the context of the four hundred years of racial capitalism. Her work for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is currently available as a limited run series on the podcast “AAUP Presents.”

Zoé Samudzi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African-American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University. She is also a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution (AFRIMUHERE).

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AokV9UO14ek

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 7, 2025

Learning to Live in the Dark: Virtual Book Talk

Join Wen Stephenson and Jane Hirshfield for a conversation on faith, humanism, and radical solidarity in the face of fascism and climate catastrophe

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Wen Stephenson's new book, Learning to Live in the Dark is a collection of hard-hitting and deeply personal essays in which the Nation writer and veteran activist traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes

Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle—including the acclaimed American poet Jane Hirshfield.

For this event, Hirshfield will join Stephenson to take up the urgent question of how to hold on to a radical commitment to a better world when crises beset us from all sides.

Purchase a copy of Learning to Live in the Dark: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2523-learning-to-live-in-the-dark

Speakers:

Jane Hirshfield, among American poetry's foremost voices for the biosphere and writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), is the author most recently of The Asking: New & Selected Poems. Hirshfield's honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Founder in 2017 of Poets for Science, Hirshfield is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A correspondent for The Nation and frequent contributor to The Baffler, he is the author previously of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other (2015), about the pivotal early years of the U.S. climate justice movement. He is a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, where he edited the Sunday Ideas section, and has written for those and many other publications, including Slate, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital. He lives near Boston.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewPT5_RW8wE

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

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