Join Bao Phi, Terisa Siagatonu, George Abraham, David Mura, Saba Keramati and other special guests for a live celebration of their poetry anthology We The Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word.
A rich anthology featuring some of the brightest voices in contemporary poetry who challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label “Asian American and Pacific Islander” (AAPI) in today’s world.
Exploring the range of experiences AAPI people endure in a world shaped by colonization and white supremacy, the poems in this collection confront American militarism, reimagine lineage, celebrate queer/trans life, and reclaim indigeneity, refugeehood, and more. Drawn from a range of schools and movements, We the Gathered Heat highlights the vitality of oral traditions in contemporary AAPI literature. Intergenerational and fiercely loving, this path breaking anthology honors our literary ancestors and makes space for AAPI literary futures.
***Please note: This discussion was recorded on September 25, 2024.***
Speakers:
Bao Phi (he/him/his) has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry. He has two collections of poems, both published by Coffee House Press, Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, the latter of which was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award, named by NPR as one of the best books of 2017, and was chosen as 2017’s best poetry book of the year by San Francisco State’s Poetry Center.
Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the Bay Area. Her presence in the poetry world as a queer Samoan woman and activist has granted her opportunities to perform and speak in places ranging from the White House (during the Obama administration) to the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France. A Kundiman Fellow and 2019 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 List Honoree, her work has been published in Poetry Magazine and has been featured on Button Poetry, CNN, NBCNews, NPR, Huffington Post, KQED, Everyday Feminism, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, and Upworthy.
Carol Ann Carl is a Native Pohnpeian poet. In 2023, she was the Poetry and the Senses fellow at the University of California–Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. She lives in Honolulu.
George Abraham is a Palestinian-American poet and memoirist who was born on unceded Timucuan lands (Jacksonville, FL). They are the author of Birthright (2020), which won the Arab American Book Award. They are currently executive editor of Mizna and teach at Amherst College.
David Mura’s most recent books are The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives and A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. His poetry books are The Last Incantations, Angels for the Burning, The Colors of Desire, and After We Lost Our Way.
Saba Keramati is the author of Self-Mythology, selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series (University of Arkansas Press, 2024). She is a Discovery Poetry Prize winner. For more, please visit www. sabakeramati.com.
Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, sound producer, and recovering social justice lawyer with Hyderabadi Muslim roots. She is the author of the poetry collection, City of Pearls (Upset Press, 2019) and has released two musical albums, City of Pearls (2019) and Moti Ka Sheher (2023), featuring self-composed musical interpretations from her book. Sham-e-Ali is the recipient of the 2022 Leeway Transformation Award, the 2016 Loft Literary Center Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship, and the 1997 echoing green fellowship. Follow Sham @sham_e_ali_nayeem.
Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2221-we-the-gathered-heat
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV6wUOag1Yg
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.
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.
In 2026, we’re celebrating 25 years of publishing “Books for Changing the World.” In those 25 years, we’ve helped build critical space and infrastructure for radical ideas and movements on the left to grow. That work of institution-building and popular political education has never been more necessary or more urgent. We need your help to continue to do this work.