This event is the second in a series of three events curated by Cortney Lamar Charleston in collaboration with The BreakBeat Poets and Haymarket Books, to celebrate the release of his new collection, Doppelgangbanger.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is joined by Patricia Smith for this event. NB: Nate Marshall was unable to join the event, but his work is read by Cortney.
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Speakers:
Nate Marshall is an award-winning author, editor, poet, playwright, performer, educator, speaker, and rapper. His book, Wild Hundreds, was honored with the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s award for Poetry Book of the Year and The Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award. He is also an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and he also co-curates The BreakBeat Poets series for Haymarket Books. Marshall co-wrote the play "No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks with Eve Ewing", produced by Manual Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation. He also wrote the audio drama "Bruh Rabbit & The Fantastic Telling of Remington Ellis, Esq.", which was produced by Make-Believe Association. His last rap album, Grown, came out in 2015 with his group Daily Lyrical Product. His second book, FINNA, was released in 2020 from One World/Random House.
Nate was born at Roseland Community Hospital and raised in the West Pullman neighborhood of Chicago. He is a proud Chicago Public Schools alumnus. Nate completed his MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers' Program. He holds a B.A. in English and African American Diaspora Studies from Vanderbilt University. Marshall has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, and The University of Michigan. Nate loves his family and friends, Black people, dope art, literature, history, arguing about top 5 lists, and beating you in spades.
Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.
She is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Patricia is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York and an instructor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/OlnZUi3W1As
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
More Episodes
Mar 1, 2021
The Pandemic is a Portal with Arundhati Roy (4-23-20)
In her latest essay, “The Pandemic Is a Portal” — from her forthcoming Haymarket Books publication Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. — Arundhati Roy writes:
What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Join the acclaimed author to discuss this essay and her recent writings on the existential threat posed to Indian democracy by an emboldened Hindu nationalism, India’s new citizenship laws that discriminate against Muslims and marginalized communities and could create a crisis of statelessness on a scale previously unknown, and the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/QmQLTnK4QTA
Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021
The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4 LatiNext (4-28-20)
Editors José Olivarez and Willie Perdomo will be joined by special guests Diannely Antigua, Rigoberto González, Janel Pineda, and Raquel Salas Rivera, for an event to launch the new anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext.
In the dynamic tradition of the BreakBeat Poets anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext celebrates the embodied narratives of Latinidad. Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space. Like Hip-Hop, we honor what was, what is, and what's next.
Get the book: www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1491-the-breakbeat-poets-vol-4
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/MIBC7OtkrkA
Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021
Microbes and Macroeconomics with David McNally and Hadas Thier (4-29-20)
Join us for a discussion on the state of the global economy with activist economists David McNally and Hadas Thier.
As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold across the world it has become increasingly obvious that we’ve only seen the first wave of shocks it will send through the global economy before things “return to normal.” Each week brings a new and completely unprecedented turn—from record setting unemployment claims, to the total implosion of oil prices. And while the conditions of lockdown are undoubtedly the catalyst for the turmoil roiling through global markets, what if it’s Capitalism’s “normal” that paved the way for the economic crisis looming on the horizon?
In this virtual teach-in, radical economists David McNally (author of the essential Global Slump) and Hadas Thier (author of the forthcoming A People’s Guide to Capitalism) will try to help activists make sense of the twists, turns, and sudden collapses in the world economy that have been playing out in the background during this global health emergency.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/zWIDsEFVGZQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Mar 1, 2021
A Working Class Vision For The Future with Sara Nelson, Stacy Davis Gates, and Sarah Jaffe(5-1-20)
Celebrate May Day with a discussion from leading labor voices Sara Nelson, Stacy Davis Gates, and Sarah Jaffe about how we can build a radical working class response to the current crisis.
What is our vision as the working class for a different future, one free from exploitation and corporate greed, and how do we organize to win it?
May Day, international workers' day, is a time to honor and celebrate the radical traditions of the labor movement. In the midst of the current crisis it is more important than ever to build on the militant legacy of May Day and organize a fighting, working-class resistance that demands a better world for us all.
Sara Nelson is the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO and she represents 50,000 of aviation’s first responders at 20 airlines. In 2019, The New York Times called her "America's most powerful flight attendant" for her role in helping to end the 35-day Government Shutdown by calling for a general strike.
Stacy Davis Gates is the Vice President of the Chicago Teachers Union. This past fall, she helped to lead a 15-day strike and to negotiate an historic contract that provides for smaller class sizes, ensures a nurse and social worker in every Chicago public school, secures sanctuary protections for immigrant families, and supports students and families experiencing homelessness.
Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at Type Media Center, the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt and the forthcoming Work Won't Love You Back, both from Bold Type Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/TEmgk2i2DFc
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021
Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw (5-5-20)
Join us for a conversation with Kimberlé Crenshaw, hosted by Janine Jackson, about why intersectionality matters in this moment of crisis.
äThe past few months have prompted unprecedented levels of turmoil and unpredictability due to rising alarm over COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2).
Coronavirus did not create the stark social, financial, and political inequalities that define life for so many of us, but it has made them more strikingly visible than at any moment in recent history.
Meanwhile, the most vulnerable to societal neglect remain most impacted. Unfortunately, some of the intersectional dimensions of these structural disparities remain undetected and unreported.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, is a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. Her work has been foundational in two fields of study that have come to be known by terms that she coined: Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.
She is the host of the African American Policy Forum's Under The Blacklight: The Intersectional Failures that COVID Lays Bare, an ongoing livestream series in which thought leaders around the country discuss the current crisis, explore how we can move forward together to protect and uplift the most vulnerable among us, and imagine the world we hope to see emerge on the other side.
Crenshaw is also the host of Intersectionality Matters.
Janine Jackson is the program directors at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and producer/host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview Press). She has appeared on ABC‘s Nightline and CNN Headline News, among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including In These Times and the UAW’s Solidarity, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library).
For more info on our sponsors:
Haymarket Books - https://www.haymarketbooks.org
African American Policy Forum (AAPF) - https://aapf.org/
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) - https://fair.org/
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/otload6iBhA
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021
The Left was Right: Radical Politics and Labor Militancy from 1945 to 2020 (5-12-20)
Join author-activists Toni Gilpin and John Nichols for a conversation on the historic consequences of ousting the Democrats' progressive wing.
To get a copy of John Nichols' new book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3082-the-fight-for-the-soul-of-the-democratic-party
To get a copy of Toni Gilpin's new book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1449-the-long-deep-grudge
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Seventy five years ago, Vice President Henry Wallace’s antiracist, progressive political vision—as well as his nomination to remain vice president—was sidelined by Democratic big city bosses and southern segregationists. As history repeats itself through Democratic insiders' staunch rejection of the Sanders campaign, how should radicals engage with the Democratic Party?
Wallace's ouster set the stage for a continued pattern of Democratic concessions to the right, and a series of blows to labor unions. As organized labor collapsed, so did the standard of living for the American working class.
In this virtual teach-in, the authors will contend with this history and offer takeaways for radicals from the campaign trail to the factory floor.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/MJPmhEHcDds
Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks