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
February 24th marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Right now, it is bombing the country’s energy system, cutting off heat and electricity for millions in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to bully Ukraine into a land for peace settlement that rewards Putin’s aggression and, with the willing collaboration of Ukraine’s oligarchs, puts the country up for sale to Western multinationals. Join this webinar to hear about Ukraine’s struggle.
Speakers:
Artem Chapeye is the author of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Guns (Washington Post 2025 best non-fiction) and The Ukraine. He is a writer, translator, activist, and, after the 2022 invasion, an enlisted member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine .
Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, Vermont State Senator, member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, and also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Denys Bondar is a native of Ukraine and an associate professor of physics at Tulane University as well as a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.
Join editors and contributors of We Are Each Other's Liberation, a major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.
A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.
Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.
Get a copy of We Are Each Other's Liberation from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2519-we-are-each-other-s-liberation
Speakers:
Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.
Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.
TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organizer, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.
Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures. Pratibha is a published author and editor of of several anthologies. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and Sming Sming Books published, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar in 2025.
Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator working on issues of militarism for over 30 years. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, with Du Re Bang and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, its US group. She also hosts feminist radio program Women’s Magazine, broadcast on KPFA Berkeley California station of the Pacifica Radio network, and is known as DJ MOR Love and Joy, transnational feminist virtual dance party DJ.
Dr. Beverley Bryan is a lifelong educator and political activist, who is co-author of the classic book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) which detailed the experiences of Black women and their fight for equality from post-war up to 1980s Britain. Dr. Bryan was a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD); a Saturday school organiser, a mainstream primary school teacher who pioneered Black history teaching in her classroom in the 1970s and a member of the British Black Panther Movement. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bryan is a retired Professor of Language Education from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.
In 2026, we’re celebrating 25 years of publishing “Books for Changing the World.” In those 25 years, we’ve helped build critical space and infrastructure for radical ideas and movements on the left to grow. That work of institution-building and popular political education has never been more necessary or more urgent. We need your help to continue to do this work.