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Podcast

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

More Episodes

Jul 28, 2025

America, América: A New History of the New World

The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. In America, América Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates that the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.

Pick up a copy of America, América here: http://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780593831250

Speakers:

Greg Grandin is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. The End of the Myth won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the prize in History. Other books include Empire’s Workshop, revised and expanded in 2021, and Kissinger’s Shadow. He is also the author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History.

Esther Allen is a writer, translator, and professor at Baruch College and City University of New York Graduate Center. She edited, translated and annotated the Selected Writings of José Martí (Penguin Classics). Her translation of Zama, the 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, won the 2017 National Translation Award. Her most recent book, a translation of Di Benedetto’s 1969 novel The Suicides, came out earlier this year.


Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAko46HvZSQ

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Jul 30, 2025

No Cop City, No Cop World

Join the editors of No Cop City, No Cop World for a panel discussion on the fight for police abolition and for a livable planet for all.

The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. No Cop City, No Cop World is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.

Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.

Order a copy of No Cop City, No Cop World here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2541-no-cop-city-no-cop-world

Speakers:

Micah Herskind is an organizer, writer, and law student who is active in abolitionist movements against police and jail expansion.

Kamau Franklin (he/him) is the founder of Community Movement Builders. He’s been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years.

Mariah Parker is an emcee and labor organizer born and raised in the South. Their cultural work and organizing have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, SPIN, Al Jazeera, Scalawag and Hammer & Hope.

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender-nonconforming people for the past four decades. She is cofounder of Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of more than 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender-nonconforming people. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub, she works with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and invest in strategies that will create safer communities. Ritchie is co-author, with Mariame Kaba, of No More Police. She is a nationally recognized researcher, policy analyst, and expert on policing and criminalization. Ritchie lives in Detroit, Michigan.


Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0RdtGIxVgk

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org


Aug 1, 2025

A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre

Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Garrett Felber for the virtual release event for the long-awaited biography of Martin Sostre—the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.

Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967.

Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey.

Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”

Get the book: https://www.akpress.org/a-continuous-struggle.html

Speakers:

Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she served as Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014-2024. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California 2007). Recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso 2024), and a foreword to the English translation of Making the World Clean by Françoise Vergès (Goldsmiths and MIT Press 2024). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (dir. Kenton Card. 2021) features her internationalist work. Honors include the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis) and the 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize.


This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and AK Press.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuu8ylfmak

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