The BreakBeat Poets Live! is a virtual, multi-generational showcase of some of the illest writers on the planet rock. Each chapter features writers and performers who are part of the Haymarket Books family.
While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our continuing to do this important work.
Penelope Alegria is the 2019 Chicago Youth Poet Laureate and a two-time member of Young Chicago Authors’ artistic apprenticeship, Louder Than a Bomb Squad. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in La Nueva Semana, El Beisman, Muse/A Journal, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, as well as BBC Radio 4 and WBEZ Radio Archives. She is a Brain Mill Press Editor’s Pick, and she was awarded the 2018 Literary Award by Julian Randall and both the 2019 and 2020 Poetry Award by the Niles West English Department. She has performed spoken word at the Obama Foundation Summit, Pitchfork Music Festival, and other venues in the Chicagoland area. She started at Harvard College in the fall of 2020.
Nilah Foster is considered a part of the queer black youth that comes from the far south side of Chicago and represents it all with her pen. She was a Louder Than A Bomb Indy finalist of 2019 and Indy winner of 2020 which also allowed her to be a part of the bombsquad 2019 and 2020 cohort. But nothing serves a better medium of learning about her than from her writing where she interrogates her own truths and where she and the audience learn together.
E’Mon Lauren is from the South Side of Chicago. She is a Scorpio enthusiast and a firm believer in Dorthy Dandridge reincarnation. E’mon uses poetry and playwriting to explore a philosophy of hood womanism. She was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. A former Kuumba Lynx Performance Ensemble slam team member and Louder Than a Bomb champion, E’mon has performed in many venues including The Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival and The Chicago Hip Hop Theatre Fest. She was a 2016 finalist for The Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. E’mon has been published in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, The Down Dirty Word, and elsewhere. She has been featured in Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and on WGN Radio. She is a member of Young Chicago Authors Teaching Artist Corps.
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His book, Citizen Illegal, won of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize and was named a top book of 2018 by NPR.
He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Poets House, and the Bronx Council on the Arts. Olivarez was awarded the Author and Artist in Justice award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. He is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Jamila Woods is an activist, award-winning poet, and singer/songwriter whose inspirations include Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Morrison, as well as Erykah Badu and Kendrick Lamar. As a solo artist, she specializes in an accessible yet non-commercial form of R&B that is rooted in soul and wholly modern, which can be heard on her albums HEAVN (2016) and LEGACY! LEGACY! (2019). She is also the co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic.
Kevin Coval is a poet and author of A People’s History of Chicago and over ten other collections, anthologies, and chapbooks. He is the founder and editor of the BreakBeat Poets series for Haymarket Books, artistic director for Young Chicago Authors, and the founder of Louder than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/NPvZi_3U_ZE
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More Episodes
Dec 23, 2023
Counterrevolution in Sudan: Understanding the Causes of the Current War
Nisrin Elamin, Raga Makawi, and Hamid Khalafallah recount the history of the 2018 Sudanese Revolution and explain the current conflict. This event took place on July 5, 2023.
Spectre Live Presents:
Counterrevolution in Sudan: Understanding the Causes of the Current War
Sudan is wracked by war between dueling military factions. Nisrin Elamin, Raga Makawi, and Hamid Khalafallah will recount the history of the 2018 Sudanese Revolution and explain how the military’s counterrevolution caused the current war. They will also show how people have survived the conflict and explore the prospects for revolutionary forces to regroup in its aftermath and renew the struggle for democracy, justice, and equality.
Introduction by Shireen Akram-Boshar
Nisrin Elamin is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Stratified Enclosures: Land, Capital and Empire-making in Central Sudan and has written for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Okay Africa, and The Egypt Independent.
Raga Makawi is a Sudanese editor and researcher currently based in the UK.
Hamid Khalafallah is a former Nonresident Fellow at TIMEP focusing on inclusive governance and mobilization in Sudan and is working as a Program Officer for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), supporting Sudan’s democratic transition.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWgBDhTKawE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Dec 23, 2023
Because You Were Mine: Book Launch and Poetry Reading
In their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival.
This event took place on July 6, 2023.
“I’ve decided I can’t trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community.
Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods.
Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood.
Get Because You Were Mine from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...
Speakers:
Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021), which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017). Janae is the recipient of the St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook Alum, a proud Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Their poetry has been published in Best American Poetry (2022), Ploughshares, the American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, the Sun Magazine, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Janae is the co-host of the podcast The Slave is Gone. Off the page they go by Breezy.
Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published through Write Bloody Press. Flame is a recipient of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture's CityArtist grant and served as Hugo House's 2017-2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry.
Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, PANK, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, and elsewhere. She is recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, and 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency.
JR Mahung is a Belizean-American poet from the South Side of Chicago and one half of the Poetry duo Black Plantains with Malcolm Friend. They teach, write, and study in Amherst, MA. JR is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2017 Emerging Poet’s Incubator Fellow, and the 2018 Individual World Poetry Slam representative for the Boston Poetry Slam. Tweet them about rice and beans @jr_mahung.
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine, editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/oQzdrRc6y7k
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Dec 23, 2023
Transgender Marxism Against the Backlash (A Spectre Live Presentation)
Join trans theorists and activists for a discussion of how "Transgender Marxism” can explain the backlash and help guide the resistance. This event took place on July 16, 2023.
The right has launched a systematic backlash against trans people. It has introduced hundreds of anti-trans bills in statehouses across the US, ramped up attacks on trans people around the world in courts and legal systems, and waged a campaign of escalating vigilante violence. Now is the time for analyzing why the right is focused on trans people as primary targets of class war from above. And now is the time for organized efforts at building broad solidarity with trans people to fight back. Join frontline trans theorists and activists for a discussion of how “Transgender Marxism” can explain the backlash and help guide the resistance.
Speakers:
Jules Gleeson is a writer, comedian and all-around communist menace. Her work has been featured in publications and live events worldwide. She was an editor of Transgender Marxism (2021) and is currently writing her own book on intersex liberation's origin story in the 1990s.
Sandow “Sandy” Sinai is a writer, musician, teacher, and communist living in Brooklyn, New York. She loves the bass guitar, psychoanalysis, and the dialectic.
Kade Doyle Griffiths is a writer and anthropologist teaching at Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is an editor of Spectre Journal and has also written for The Nation,In These Times, and Historical Materialism.
Chair:
Vanessa Wills is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. She specializes in moral, social, and political philosophy, nineteenth century German philosophy (especially Karl Marx), and the philosophy of race.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/yHjQvjOQoe4
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Dec 24, 2023
Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies
Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today. This event took place on July 19, 2023.
Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Most recently, legislatures across the country have moved to ban Black Studies from curricula, while the right mobilizes outrage against librarians and educators. These attacks come in the context of a backlash against the popular 2020 uprising against racism and police violence, and are being amplified in the halls of power from Congress to the Supreme Court.
Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley, co-editors with Colin Kaepernick of the new book Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, for a wide-ranging conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today, from the classroom to the streets.
Speakers:
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/K6MLtFeZcak
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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Dec 24, 2023
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
The past few years have brought a huge resurgence in labor organizing across the U.S.—efforts which, from Chris Smalls’ founding of the Amazon Labor Union to Cecily Myart-Cruz’s work as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, have been driven in large part by members of the Black working class. In award-winning historian Blair LM Kelley’s BLACK FOLK, she shows conclusively that this legacy of Black labor organizing stretches back to before Emancipation. Highlighting the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers whose established networks of resistance are still alive today, her narrative treats Black workers not just as laborers or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered in their own right.
This event took place on July 27, 2023.
Kelley demonstrates that the church yards, factory floors, railcars, and postal sorting facilities where Black people worked were sites of possibility, and, as she suggests, Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes could be the same today. BLACK FOLK is thus not just an epic of American history writ large—it’s a vision, too, of our possible future.
For this virtual launch event, Kelley will be joined by Robin D.G. Kelley.
Get a copy of BLACK FOLK: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978163149...
Blair LM Kelley is the director of the Center for the Study of the American South and codirector of the Southern Futures initiative at the University of North Carolina. Her first book, Right to Ride, won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her writing of Black Folk. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBv1CGteQLc
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 24, 2023
Defend Mutual Aid: Pushing back against attempts to criminalize solidarity
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
