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

Over the course of the past year, The Work and Us has been conducting surveys of incarcerated people to find out what they're thinking about prison labor, extraction, and freedom. In this conversation scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore and currently incarcerated organizer Stevie Wilson discuss some of the results, and what they mean for the struggle. This event took place on October 12, 2023. Speakers Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press) and the forthcoming book Change Everything (Haymarket) . Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021). Stephen Wilson is a currently incarcerated, Black, queer writer, activist and student. He is a founding member of Dreaming Freedom Practicing Abolition, a network of self-organized prisoner study groups building abolitionist community behind and across prison walls. Follow him on Twitter @AlwaysStevie. Minali Aggarwal is a graduate student worker, organizer, and artist. Her research focuses on race and politics, specifically the ways race is constructed and reified through cultural and political processes and institutions. She is a co-organizer of The Work and Us, an abolitionist participatory research project aimed at understanding and documenting the perspectives of imprisoned people on labor, prison, and the struggle for freedom. Special thanks to the Marguerite Casey Foundation for helping sponsor this talk. This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Study & Struggle. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/_W2nyvQQ52U Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for the live stream of a conversation with Syrian writer & former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh moderated by Wendy Pearlman & Danny Postel. Broadcasting from Haymarket House. This event took place on October 17, 2023. Join us for the livestream of a conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the leading intellectual voice of the Syrian uprising and one of the key thinkers in the Arab world today, during his first visit ever to the U.S. Among al-Haj Saleh’s nine books is The Impossible Revolution (Haymarket Books, 2017), which makes sense of both the nature of authoritarian domination in Syria and the historic popular struggle to topple it. Moderated by Wendy Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria and Danny Postel, co-editor of The Syria Dilemma and The People Reloaded, this dialogue will explore the origins and trajectory of the Syrian uprising, the internal and external forces that thwarted it, what comes next in the quest of emancipatory change, what lessons the Syrian experience might have for other struggles, and what lessons other struggles might have for Syria. This public event is co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies Program, New Lines Magazine, and Haymarket Books. Speakers: Yassin al-Haj Saleh is the leading intellectual voice of the Syrian uprising and one of the key thinkers in the Arab world today. Born in the city of Raqqa in 1961, he was arrested in 1980 in Aleppo for his membership in a left-wing political organization and spent 16 years in prison. His wife, Samira al-Khalil, was abducted by an armed Islamist group in 2013. He is the author of nine books, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017) and The Atrocious and its Representation (English edition forthcoming). One of the founders of the bilingual Arabic-English platform Aljumhuriya.net, he writes for a variety of international publications and is a Contributing Writer for New Lines Magazine. He is now based in Berlin. Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also holds the Crown Professorship of Middle East Studies and is currently director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies program. She is the author of Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (2003); Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (2011); We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017); Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (with Boaz Atzili, 2018); and Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out (with Muzoon Almellehan, 2023). Her sixth book, The Home I Worked To Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, is forthcoming from Liveright Books in 2024. Danny Postel is Politics Editor of New Lines Magazine, an award-winning global affairs publication which the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard says has “built a home for long-form international reporting.” He is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran (2006) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2010), The Syria Dilemma (2013), and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017). His current book-in-progress, “Critical Solidarity,” explores the legacies of the late international relations theorist, Middle East scholar and internationalist Fred Halliday. This event is co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies Program, New Lines Magazine, and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/qfmjwRD_ho4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Barbara Smith,Tamika Middleton, Haley Pessin and Jaimee A. Swift as they discuss historical & contemporary issues Black feminists face. This event took place on October 18, 2023. To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology Barbara Smith, Tamika Middleton, Haley Pessin, and Jaimee A. Swift will discuss the historical impact of Home Girls and contemporary issues that Black feminist activists face today. Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition published by Rutgers University Press, is available at Bookshop.org. Speakers: Tamika Middleton is Managing Director of Women's March. She is an organizer, doula, writer, and unschooling mama who is passionate about and active in struggles that affect Black women’s lives. Tamika has organized for abolition, reproductive justice, and for domestic workers’ rights. She is a consultant with Winds of Change Consulting, and a founding member of the Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid (MAMA) Fund and JustGeorgia. She serves as a Community Advisory Board member of Critical Resistance, a Leadership Team member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and an advisory board member of Cypress Fund x The Grove. Haley Pessin is a socialist activist living in Queens, New York and is a member of the Tempest Collective. They co-edited the book Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope published by Seven Stories Press. Jaimee A. Swift (she/her) is the executive director and founder of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people's radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. She is also the creator and founder of The School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP), the Black feminist political education arm of Black Women Radicals. The mission of the SBFP is to empower Black feminisms in Black Politics by expanding the field from transnational, intersectional, and multidisciplinary perspectives. She is the co-author, with Joseph R. Fitzgerald, of the forthcoming biography of Black feminist icon, Barbara Smith. Barbara Smith is an independent scholar and was co-founder and publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has been writer in residence and taught at numerous colleges and universities for over twenty-five years. The author of many books, articles, and essays, including The Truth That Never Hurts ———————————— This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, and Rutgers University Press. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/oAg8nCQV83A Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a livestream from Haymarket House: the first of a four-part public discussion series focused on Chicago’s left political landscape and movement! This event took place on October 25, 2023. We’re kicking off our Chicago Conversations series with a discussion about building & wielding left political power. Chicago’s robust left social movements have re-shaped what’s possible in our city – making way for big progressive wins like expanded housing protections, wage increases, expanding public mental health infrastructure, and taking racist surveillance tools away from the police department. At the same time as there are openings for real progressive change, the city is also facing many challenges, like the migrant crisis, continued police violence and housing shortages. Now with a mayor supported by Chicago’s labor and racial justice movements and a more progressive City Council than ever before, what does it look like for movements outside of City Hall to press for transformative change? How should social movements like the movement for Black lives, like the climate justice movement, like the labor movement, like the movement for migrant justice continue to engage in elections? How do we relate to leftists and progressives in government? How do we respond to the many immediate crises the city is facing now and also build more lasting change moving forward? And what does it mean to have “political power” in a system that has so systematically excluded those at the margins and upheld the status quo? We’ll be joined by Kennedy Bartley (United Working Families), Jung Yoon (Grassroots Collaborative & the People’s Unity Platform), and Jeanette Taylor (Alderwoman of Chicago’s 20th Ward). These conversations will be moderated by Asha Ransby-Sporn. There will be a roundtable discussion with the speakers followed by some time for audience Q and A. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/c_PfbMvOma0 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