Podcast

Haymarket Poetry Presents: Daniella Toosie-Watson on What We Do with God

Join Daniella Toosie-Watson, E. Hughes, and Hanif Abdurraqib for a launch and celebration of Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection, What We Do With God.

Daniella Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection meditates on the politics of mental health, pleasure, and the natural world. In this book, the everyday miracles of insects are studied, celebrated, and made sacrosanct. Prayer and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Propriety has no bearing on sensual connection and exploration.

What We Do with God dives into the grotesque, the bestial, the surreal, as a means to defamiliarize abuse; it’s a practice of reclamation. With an unapologetic impiety to holiness and waywardness, What We Do with God invites readers to enter a world where care extends beyond ourselves and those closest to us to ecosystems holding the wider world together.

“Do not mistake the whimsy and irreverence blooming through this collection as a lack of gravity–it is quite the opposite. These poems reinforce how brutally essential a playful imagination is to reckon with a deadly world where faith and grace are hard-earned. Toosie-Watson has compiled a glorious collection burning bright with a wild wit and an even more ferocious wisdom.” Tarfia Faizullah

Speakers:

Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) is a writer, visual artist, and the author of What We Do with God (Haymarket Books, 2025). She has been published in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Oxford Poetry, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize Shortlist, the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and a Graduate Hopwood Award & Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received her MFA in poetry. Daniella lives in New York.

E. Hughes is the author of Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and the Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. Currently, Hughes is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Emory University in Continental Philosophy.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in the FADER, Pitchfork, New Yorker, and New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/towhupw2ddA

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

More Episodes

Sep 26, 2022

Keywords for Capitalism: A Field Guide for Decoding the Language of Power, Society, and Politics

Join John Patrick Leary & Greg Grandin on the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths used to disguise the horrors of our political system. From "liberal" to "the economy" the terms used by "pundits" and politicians to explain our civic structures tend to obscure as much as they reveal about the reality they ostensibly describe. Yet the enduring vocabulary of radical movement-building can be equally opaque when filtered through both the distortions of the status quo and the partisan interests of the activist left. How do we make sense of terms like "socialism" and "intersectional" that are so routinely used and abused by such a wide array of commentators from across the political spectrum? In his new book, Keywords for Capitalism, John Patrick Leary offers a probing and insightful guide designed to equip readers with the tools to do just that. Leary takes a wit-sharpened scalpel to the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths that crowd ‘the discourse’ and reveals the ideology of the mainstream political media that lies just below the surface. Leary will be joined for this launch event by Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin. Together they will masterfully dress down and dissect the froth of corporate media jargon that we may not even know we’re forced to swim through on a daily basis. Get Keywords for Capitalism from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1886-keywords-for-capitalism --------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: John Patrick Leary is the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism and A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the US Imagination. He teaches social studies in the Philadelphia public schools. Greg Grandin is the author of The Pulitzer Prize winning The End of the Myth, Empire’s Workshop, The Empire of Necessity, and is currently the C Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6C_AoUzEviw Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Listen now

Sep 26, 2022

The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

Join David Roediger and Nan Enstad as they challenge the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan, “save the middle class,” has become ubiquitous within political circles, despite the fact that it misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths that the US is a providentially middle class nation. In these discussions the middle class is implicitly white and presented—usually by liberal commentators—as unheard amidst concerns for racial justice and for the poor. In this launch for David Roediger’s The Sinking Middle Class, the author will be joined by Nan Enstad for a discussion how the image of the United States as a middle class nation corresponds to neither contemporary nor historical reality. Get The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1879-the-sinking-middle-class ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Nan Enstad is the Buttel-Sewell Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author of Cigarettes Inc: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism. Her research and teaching examines the history of global capitalism and how people have lived and struggled within and against it. She has longstanding commitments to cultural, anti-racist, ethnic, labor, queer, and gender studies that inform how she approach any subject. She is currently exploring controversies around large-scale animal agriculture. David Roediger teaches in American Studies, History, and African and African American Studies at University of Kansas. His recent books include How Race Survived United States History and Class, Race and Marxism. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/ShDFFAROHRU Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Listen now

Sep 26, 2022

Freeing Education — Conversation 1: Deconstruction, Refusal, Departure

Join No More Exclusions, Haymarket Books, and Hajar Press for a series of conversations on abolitionist education. Over the course of three online discussions, No More Exclusions will bring together radical voices from the UK and international community to develop an abolitionist vision of education. Exchanges will take place across different contexts, linking them via shared themes of community, resistance, and liberation in the face of education systems that insist on violence. ———————————————————————— Conversation 1: Deconstruction, Refusal, Departure The first conversation will focus on unpicking the harms of schooling as part of a wider system of carceral feminism and imperialism, before turning to explore the transformational work that is currently in progress and taking stock of the struggle in education from an international perspective. --------------------------------------------------------------------- About No More Exclusions https://nomoreexclusions.com/ No More Exclusions is a grassroots abolitionist coalition working to end exclusion in education in all its forms. You can find out more about NME’s work here: https://bit.ly/3Pf9mW0. If you are able, please consider making a solidarity donation to NME’s crowdfunder here: https://bit.ly/3aPAvQv. Speakers: Zahra Bei (she/her) is a Recovering Teacher and Organizer with No More Exclusions. Lola Olufemi (she/they) is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Sara Bafo (she/her) is an Organiser with No More Exclusions Cradle Community is a collective experimenting with how we build transformative justice and community accountability in our communities. If you are able, please consider supporting Cradle’s work here: https://bit.ly/3yLCvRD. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This event series is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books, Hajar Press, and No More Exclusions. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/7uC1M5acVVQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Listen now

Sep 26, 2022

What is the Relevance of the Russian Revolution Today? A Debate w/ Kshama Sawant & Eric Blanc

Tune in for a debate between Kshama Sawant and Eric Blanc, on the relevance of the Russian Revolution Today. Few political questions from the 20th century were so fraught as how to understand the Russian Revolution. Inspiring example of workers throwing off the Tsarist yoke and rattling the foundations of capitalism, or well-spring of tyranny and the antithesis of the benighted values of ‘The West’? Even among its most ardent defenders debates raged about what lessons to draw from the experience of the revolution, and how (or whether) to replicate the organizational model of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. Though these very questions animated several generations of activists and organizers on the Left in countries across the globe, how relevant are they for today’s burgeoning socialist movement in a modern democratic state? What lessons can we apply to the current world situation? Taking as their starting point the ground-breaking contributions of Eric Blanc’s Revolutionary Social Democracy, Blanc and Seattle’s socialist city councilwoman Kshama Sawant will debate exactly what we can learn from the Russian Revolution for our contemporary struggles. Blanc and Sawant will be joined by Bryan Koulouris of Socialist Alternative, for a debate moderated by Bhaskar Sunkara. Get a copy of Revolutionary Social Democracy from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1907-revolutionary-social-democracy ———————————————————————————————— Speakers: Kshama Sawant is a Seattle city councilwoman and member of Socialist Alternative and the Democratic Socialists of America. Eric Blanc is the author of Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, and an organizer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. Bryan Koulouris is the national organizer for Socialist Alternative, and an executive committee member of International Socialist Alternative Bhaskar Sunkara (moderator) is the founding editor of Jacobin and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. Watch the live event recording: Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Listen now

Sep 26, 2022

Learning As Rebellion: Resisting Right-Wing Attacks on Higher Ed Across the Americas

Join Haymarket Books, and NACLA for a discussion of how to resist the conservative attacks on higher education From Brazil to Puerto Rico to the United States, conservative politicians have set their sights on schools as key ideological battlegrounds. And when vulnerable students and scholars are targeted for their identities and/or politics, universities often fail to protect them for fear of alienating donors or powerful political allies. What can we do to fight back and protect one another? As right-wing forces work to dismantle accessible education and limit academic freedom in countries across the Americas, join us for a virtual roundtable inspired by Lorgia García Peña’s recent book, Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color. In conversation with García Peña, scholar-activists Luciana Brito and Geo Maher, with moderation by Marisol LeBrón, will discuss the recent wave of attacks on education across the Americas and envision how to build liberatory spaces of learning and transformation. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Luciana Brito is a historian and professor at the Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia-Brasil, specializing in the history of slavery and abolition in Brazil and the United States. She is member of the Executive committee of ASWAD (Association for the Worldwide Diaspora), is columnist of Nexo Jornal and has been publishing a lot of academic and non-academic articles about race, gender, class and inequality in the Americas. She is the author of the book Fears of Africa: Security, Legislation and African Population in 19th Century Bahia. Instagram: @lucianabritohistoria Marisol LeBrón is associate professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua/Contra Muerto Rico: Lecciones del Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021) and Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019). Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer and organizer, and Visiting Associate Professor of Global Political Thought at Vassar College. He has taught previously at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the College of William and Mary's Decolonizing Humanities Project, NYU's Hemispheric Institute, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He his co-editor of the Duke University Press series Radical Américas and author of five books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune (Verso, 2016), Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017), A World Without Police (Verso, 2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California, 2022). Lorgia García Peña is the author of Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color and is a first generation Latinx Studies scholar. Dr. García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University and a Casey Foundation 2021 Freedom Scholar. She studies global Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on Black Latinidad. Dr. García Peña is the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia and of Archives of Justice (Milan-Boston). Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/gJ2EnOVFAxk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Listen now

Sep 26, 2022

Credible Strike Threats, Global Supply Chains & Choke Point Organizing

Join us for a discussion of global labor organizing hosted by Internationalism from Below and Haymarket Books. The global supply chain crisis in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to reflect on the vulnerabilities of the just-in-time model of capitalist production. As capital studies and prepares for risks to the global supply chain, so must workers if we are to make global systemic changes needed to reverse the many catastrophic crises facing the planet. The new issue of the journal New Global Studies features a forum on Workers’ Movements and the Global Supply Chain, which examines unions and global labor organizing in seven countries, identifying and assessing strategies for cross-border worker organizing at these choke points to apply pressure, extract gains, and tip the balance of power in their favor. Join us for this discussion with two of the contributors to that forum, Robert Ovetz and Gifford Hartman, leading experts on global labor struggles and strategy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Ovetz is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at San José State University. He focuses on global labor organizing strategy and is the Membership & Organizing Chair of his union, the SJSU chapter of California Faculty Association, an anti-racist, social justice union of 29,000 faculty members in the California State University system. He is the editor of Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives (2020) and the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (2018) and We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (2022). He writes about worker organizing for Dollars & Sense magazine, is Book Review Editor of the Journal of Labor and Society, and is a contributor to The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy (2022). He can reached at [email protected] and his writings can be found here. Gifford Hartman is a Certified Trainer and Instructional Assistant for the Global Labour University, a founding member of the San Francisco Bay Area-based Global Supply Chain Study/Research Group, and the International Solidarity Liaison for Railroad Workers United. Over the last 25 years he has been an adult educator, labor trainer and labor historian. Prior to that, he was a rank-and-file member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). He has helped organize workshops, seminars, conferences and educational training sessions for unions, labor activists and environmental organizations in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. His article “Supply Chain Workers’ Inquiries: Class Struggle along Value Chains” appears in the current issue of New Global Studies. He can be contacted at [email protected] and his writings can be found here. Moderator: Lala Peñaranda is a climate and labor activist from Colombia, based in New York. She is a member of Internationalism from Below, Science for the People, and DSA. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/kjsHtYpNUj8 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Listen now