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
The Trump regime took advantage of the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement under the Biden administration to launch a full-scale assault on higher education. He has unleashed ICE on student activists, branded any dissent against Israel’s genocidal war “antisemitic,” bullied universities into cancelling programs on race and gender, and defunded entire institutions. Join us for this Spectre Live panel of activist educators to discuss how to resist Trump’s New McCarthyism.
Speakers:
Isaac Kamola is a professor of political science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is author of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (2021) and Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (2019). He currently directs the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
Heba Gowayed is a writer and associate professor sociology at CUNY Hunter college and a current Carnegie Fellow. She is the author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (2022).
Vineeta Singh is a fellow at AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, an associate editor of Ethnic Studies Review, and a non-tenure track college teacher. She studies the history of US higher education as a site of racial contestation, so we can put contemporary confrontations about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the context of the four hundred years of racial capitalism. Her work for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is currently available as a limited run series on the podcast “AAUP Presents.”
Zoé Samudzi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African-American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University. She is also a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution (AFRIMUHERE).
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AokV9UO14ek
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Wen Stephenson and Jane Hirshfield for a conversation on faith, humanism, and radical solidarity in the face of fascism and climate catastrophe
-
Wen Stephenson's new book, Learning to Live in the Dark is a collection of hard-hitting and deeply personal essays in which the Nation writer and veteran activist traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes
Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle—including the acclaimed American poet Jane Hirshfield.
For this event, Hirshfield will join Stephenson to take up the urgent question of how to hold on to a radical commitment to a better world when crises beset us from all sides.
Purchase a copy of Learning to Live in the Dark: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2523-learning-to-live-in-the-dark
Speakers:
Jane Hirshfield, among American poetry's foremost voices for the biosphere and writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), is the author most recently of The Asking: New & Selected Poems. Hirshfield's honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Founder in 2017 of Poets for Science, Hirshfield is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A correspondent for The Nation and frequent contributor to The Baffler, he is the author previously of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other (2015), about the pivotal early years of the U.S. climate justice movement. He is a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, where he edited the Sunday Ideas section, and has written for those and many other publications, including Slate, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital. He lives near Boston.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewPT5_RW8wE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Haymarket Books and Parceo for a discussion on how our pedagogies can ground our organizing in collective struggles for justice.
How do our pedagogies impact and help ground our organizing and the ways we can connect and build upon our collective struggles for justice?
How do we learn (and share our learning) from our organizing in ways that broaden and deepen our movements?
How does our political education impact our organizing, our thinking, our work, our connections and interconnections?
What are the challenges we face in our different spaces in elevating our deep commitments and principles–and action?
Moderator/opening–Lesley Williams, Educator and writer
Panelists:
Mizue Aizeki, Collaborative Research Center for Resilience
Maya Suzuki Daniels, Educator and Organizer
Lara Kiswani, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC)
Merrie Najimy, Veteran Anti-Racist Educator, MTA Rank And File for Palestine
Rebecca Vilkomerson, Funding Freedom
Closing--Nina Mehta, PARCEO
This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books, and PARCEO.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRxhKgRwxBw
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join internationalist organizers discussing the lessons contemporary international solidarity movements can learn from past struggles against the Vietnam War and in support of Vietnamese liberation.
View the A Luta Continua Zine Series: https://bit.ly/intlsolidarityzines
Download the Solidarity and War in Vietnam Zine: https://bit.ly/vietnamzine
2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the victory of the Vietnamese liberation forces over the imperialist US military. This timing coincides with the release of the zine, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF Is Gonna Win: Solidarity and the War in Vietnam 1955-1975, written by James Kilgore. The zine is an overview of the international solidarity efforts that emerged in the US and beyond in support of the Vietnamese struggle and is part of the zine series A La Luta Continua from Community Justice Exchange.
The launch of this zine comes at a moment when a massive global solidarity movement has emerged in support of the liberation of Palestine. In this webinar, a panel comprised of individuals who took part in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s, as well as contemporary activists engaged in Palestinian solidarity organizing, will share perspectives on the parallels and differences in the struggles, look at lessons learned from the support for the Vietnamese, and assess how we might learn from that history. The discussion hopes to provoke answers on how we can mobilize more support for Palestinian freedom and build a global movement based on international solidarity and visions of true liberation.
This event is organized by Community Justice Exchange in partnership with Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF89oS7CtL4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
A perilous situation faces Ukraine in the aftermath of the recent Trump-Putin summit, in which the partition of its land and people were proposed without a Ukrainian voice at the table. This panel will discuss the regional and global ramifications of Russia’s war of occupation and ways to solidarize with those opposing it.
Speakers:
Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, clinical social worker, and a member of Vermont’s Progressive Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, and recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.
Ilya Budraitskis is a political researcher and socialist activist previously based in Moscow. His essay collection Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia was published by Verso in 2022.
Denys Bondar, a native of Ukraine, is a professor of physics at Tulane University and is a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network.
Howie Hawkins, USN and Green Party presidential candidate 2020
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Ukraine Solidarity Network.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHRol0nAhM
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join us for the next event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is joined by Uahikea Maile for a conversation on decolonial strategies that look to water as a catalyst for radical transformation. Co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books
In her powerful new book, Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.
Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.
Theory of Water is a genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force–water–through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers.
Speakers:
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and member of Alderville First Nation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is the author of seven previous books, including Rehearsals for Living with Robyn Maynard, and the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies. Her newest book is Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.
Dr. Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, organizer, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is assistant professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Maile’s current book manuscript, Gifts of Sovereignty: Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Politics in Hawaiʻi, examines the historical development and contemporary formation of settler colonial capitalism in Hawai‘i and gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn it by issuing responsibilities for balancing relationships with ‘āina, the land and that who feeds.
This event is co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books and Haymarket Books, and is part of the Haymarket Presents speakers series.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxWlazKmtQ4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org