Criminalization is not only a primary tool to suppress dissent, silence opposition, and enforce policies that consolidate and enforce power - it is at the core of how Right wing, authoritarian and fascist agendas, movements, and regimes are enacted, legitimized, and entrenched.
Interrupting criminalization - a political process that extends beyond criminal laws, policing, and punishment to a collective construction of categories of "others" framed as existential threats to an imagined and actual social order to be contained, expelled, and, ultimately eradicated - must therefore be at the core of our resistance.
Join panelists Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Herzing, and Scot Nakagawa in exploring the central role of criminalization in shaping the current and evolving political terrain, and the essential role of challenging criminalization and confronting carceral logics and systems in strategies for resistance and solidarity across movements to fight fascism and authoritarianism worldwide.
Speakers:
Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, gender, reproductive, economic, environmental and migrant justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.
Scot Nakagawa is a political strategist and organizer with over four decades of experience exploring questions of structural racism, white supremacy, and social justice. He is the co-founder and director of the 22nd Century Initiative, a national strategy and action hub building power at the intersection of opposition to authoritarianism and expanding democratic governance in the U.S.
Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and educator fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment. Herzing is co-author, with Justin Piché, of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment (2024). Herzing is director of the Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis, was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; co-director of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions, a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.
Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, writer, and strategist with 25 years of experience leading organizations within racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, transformative justice and economic justice movements. They are the Founding Director of Ejerie Labs where they focus on building movement strategy towards creating transformative futures and curtailing rising fascism. Ejeris serves as the host of the Fascism Barometer, a podcast and learning hub that discusses fascism’s rise in the United States, and how to organize against it. For ten years Ejeris served as the Founding Executive Director of Vision Change Win Consulting, where they partnered with organizations throughout the United States and internationally to build their organizing and community safety infrastructure and capacity. Ejeris is also the co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. Over the past twenty-five years Ejeris has directly worked on thousands of incidents of violence and directly organized around more than a hundred murders of Queer and Trans People of Color.
Woods Ervin is an organizer that has been working for over a decade in movements both for trans self-determination as well as for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. She has worked at both TGI Justice Project and Interrupting Criminalization. She is currently a co-director at Critical Resistance, an organization that launches campaigns and projects for PIC abolition, at which she’s been volunteering since 2010.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Interrupting Criminalization.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzuy7U1mdh4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. In America, América Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates that the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.
Pick up a copy of America, América here: http://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780593831250
Speakers:
Greg Grandin is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. The End of the Myth won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the prize in History. Other books include Empire’s Workshop, revised and expanded in 2021, and Kissinger’s Shadow. He is also the author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History.
Esther Allen is a writer, translator, and professor at Baruch College and City University of New York Graduate Center. She edited, translated and annotated the Selected Writings of José Martí (Penguin Classics). Her translation of Zama, the 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, won the 2017 National Translation Award. Her most recent book, a translation of Di Benedetto’s 1969 novel The Suicides, came out earlier this year.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAko46HvZSQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join the editors of No Cop City, No Cop World for a panel discussion on the fight for police abolition and for a livable planet for all.
The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. No Cop City, No Cop World is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.
Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.
Order a copy of No Cop City, No Cop World here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2541-no-cop-city-no-cop-world
Speakers:
Micah Herskind is an organizer, writer, and law student who is active in abolitionist movements against police and jail expansion.
Kamau Franklin (he/him) is the founder of Community Movement Builders. He’s been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years.
Mariah Parker is an emcee and labor organizer born and raised in the South. Their cultural work and organizing have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, SPIN, Al Jazeera, Scalawag and Hammer & Hope.
Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender-nonconforming people for the past four decades. She is cofounder of Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of more than 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender-nonconforming people. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub, she works with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and invest in strategies that will create safer communities. Ritchie is co-author, with Mariame Kaba, of No More Police. She is a nationally recognized researcher, policy analyst, and expert on policing and criminalization. Ritchie lives in Detroit, Michigan.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0RdtGIxVgk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Garrett Felber for the virtual release event for the long-awaited biography of Martin Sostre—the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.
Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967.
Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey.
Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”
Get the book: https://www.akpress.org/a-continuous-struggle.html
Speakers:
Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she served as Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014-2024. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California 2007). Recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso 2024), and a foreword to the English translation of Making the World Clean by Françoise Vergès (Goldsmiths and MIT Press 2024). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (dir. Kenton Card. 2021) features her internationalist work. Honors include the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis) and the 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and AK Press.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuu8ylfmak
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Austin Sauerbrei and Katey Lauer for a virtual launch of Trouble! at Coal Creek, a gripping graphic novel tells the story of the 1891 Coal Creek War.
Told through the eyes of a young Welsh immigrant, Trouble! at Coal Creek is the epic story of a cross-racial struggle to abolish the system of convict-leasing in the mines. Austin Sauerbrei's evocative black-and-white illustrations and masterful storytelling show the personal battles and motivations that led thousands of miners to repeatedly take up arms against the powerful companies, their militias, and politicians.
Lured by coal companies’ promises of good pay, stability, and opportunity, the narrator’s father brought their family across the Atlantic Ocean for work in the mine. The job, however, was deadly, and life grew unbearable as the coal companies immiserated miners and their families. Meanwhile, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, racist terror, and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan were still fresh memories for most. Coal companies relied increasingly on the forced labor of mostly Black prisoners who were loaned out from the state, an extremely profitable continuation of the old system of racist brutality. As Ida B. Wells noted at the time, "The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand."
The miners of Coal Creek, however, set fire to the edifice of convict-leasing and inspired similar rebellions throughout the South. In this captivating graphic novel, Saurbrei brings their overlooked story to life for new generations of organizers.
Order a copy of Trouble! at Coal Creek here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2529-trouble-at-coal-creek
Speakers:
Austin Sauerbrei is a community organizer and sequential artist based in Tennessee. He currently serves as the Director of Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), a 52-year-old, member-led organization dedicated to empowering Tennesseans in their efforts to have a greater voice in determining their own future. Austin spent years as a neighborhood and tenant organizer in Nashville, and then as the organizer for both the Chattanooga and Knoxville-Oak Ridge AFL-CIO Labor Councils. A lifelong comics enthusiast, Austin practices visual storytelling as a form of popular education. He and his wife, Claire Brown, live in Athens, Tennessee, with their three children.
Katey Lauer is an organizer, facilitator, and trainer in West Virginia, with a deep love of place. She has formed and led grassroots organizations in the Appalachian mountains for 15 years, as Coordinator of The Alliance for Appalachia, Lead Organizer of Appalachia Rising and The March on Blair Mountain, and founding Director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Architect of the WV Can’t Wait movement, Katey currently acts as Co-chair of this statewide formation that’s out to win a people’s government in the mountain state. Katey is also a Core Trainer Training for Change.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAXm-OMPRNo
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Global Jews for Palestine and Haymarket Books for a discussion on Palestinian liberation and building Anti-Zionist Jewish community.
Mission Statement:
We are Jews from many countries who are members of local, national and international networks and organizations. We are multi-ethnic and multigenerational and our members embrace a broad range of viewpoints on Jewish religious and ethical traditions. We are connected by our involvement in the struggle for Palestinian rights, and by our determination to work for justice. We oppose Zionism and all forms of racism and colonialism.
We believe that it is our particular responsibility to challenge Jewish organizations whose alliances and actions undermine Palestinian human and national rights, promote Jewish exceptionalism, and overturn Jewish social justice traditions. At the heart of our work is the fight for Palestinian liberation and the struggle for a world free of racial and ethnic hierarchy, colonial domination, and unbridled militarism.
Background:
Global Jews for Palestine initially came together to share our experiences of opposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism - a document that is being used to shield Israel from valid political challenge and to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights. Since our founding in 2019, we have come to recognize that our purpose is to be a powerful and effective global Jewish voice advocating for Palestinian liberation.
In the past year, as we have witnessed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and intensified ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, we are more committed than ever to making our voices heard and to standing together with the Palestinian people.
Moderator:
Marilyn Garson, Alternative Jewish Voices (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Panelists:
Sheryl Nestel, Independent Jewish Voices (Canada)
Wieland Hoban, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Germany)
Iván Zeta, Judíes x Palestina (Argentina)
Closing:
Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian Physician
This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Global Jews for Palestine.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrmXSnmFLPU
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join us for an evening of poetry and readings to raise money for vital mutual aid efforts in Gaza. As the zionist occupation - backed by the US, Britain and their allies - announces plans to openly ethnically cleanse and seize Gaza City, while forced starvation of Palestinians across Gaza rages on, we ask you to please donate what you can to provide food, water and essential supplies. These donations can save lives.
This event is organised by Books Against Borders, with collaboration from the White Kite Collective, Haymarket Books, and the long list of authors, poets and performers* who have contributed to this fundraiser.
Find more info and fundraiser links here: https://linktr.ee/booksagainstborders
Speakers:
Kamila Shamsie
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan
White Kite Collective
Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso
Zainab Hasan
Sirine Saba
Heba Al-Agha
Julia Choucair-Vizoso
Emile Saba
Hossam Madhoun
Ruth Lass
Maxine Peake
Hanan Habashi
Zia Ahmed
Tom Branfoot
Lola Olufemi
Tasneim Zyada
lisa minerva luxx
Rachel Spence
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About the Fundraisers:
All funds raised will go to urgent fundraisers in Gaza. Half of ticket sales will go to Bridge of Solidarity, an anti-capitalist mutual aid organisation set up by Yazan, a young Gazan poet, challenging the genocide through mutual aid and the distribution of food, water, and funds. A quarter each of ticket sales will also go to fundraisers for friends in Gaza who are dependent on this money to support their families in the face of starvation, including our friends Iman and Raed. We will also be amplifying other projects and fundraisers here and throughout the event.
Bridge of Solidarity is an anti-capitalist mutual aid organization founded in Gaza by Yazan, in Al Mawasi, Khan Younis, focused on the most marginalized in Gaza most at risk of dying: people without phones, English skills, social media, wealthy relatives, outside support, and living relatives. You can donate directly to this fundraiser here: https://chuffed.org/project/bridgeofs...
Iman and her family, from her young niece and nephew to her elderly parents, have been displaced multiple times and had their homes and neighbourhood destroyed. We are raising money to support them to access basic needs and supplies in the face of starvation and serious health problems, and to raise funds for her and others in her family to evacuate when it is safe to do so. You can support Iman and her family directly here: https://gofund.me/c9689660
Raed and his family have narrowly survived multiple horrific attacks, including the Al-Ma’madani massacre and strikes that have taken the lives of relatives. Their home was destroyed and they have lost everything. This fundraiser is to support them access basic supplies, with food and other necessities at extreme prices and difficult to access. You can support Raed and his family directly here: https://chuffed.org/project/help-raed-in-gaza
We would also like to direct people to Shadows, an independent, non-profit artistic collective based in Gaza, established in 2020, and their ongoing campaign to develop a permanent children's performing arts club in Gaza. Please donate what you can to support this important work to foster expression, psychosocial support, and cultural resistance amongst communities in the Gaza strip. Support here: https://chuffed.org/project/134634-sh...
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/DFmcLVV52aw
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org”