A conversation with leading Atlanta-based organizers about the deep, intersectional, and transformative struggle for Black liberation. ---------------------------------------------------- Much of the ‘back of the house' organizing that has made the current rebellion and political moment possible goes unseen. So often images of protestors in the streets capture our collective attention and imagination. People often think that protests and marches define organizing. However, so much of what Black organizers do involves more mundane and less sexy work like: mutual aid, transformative justice, fundraising for bail, working to fight evictions, healing and carework. This work helps lay the groundwork for getting people to imagine the abolition of policing and other violent systems in order to build support networks (and worlds) that don’t rely on the logics of anti-Blackness. This behind the scenes work is also gendered, racialized, and classed labor that many Black queer, trans, non-binary, and disabled femmes perform. Why is this organizing work important? How is it beautiful/artful? How do we elevate/celebrate it? How do we invite people into this beautiful work? Speakers: Mary Hooks is the co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). SONG is a political home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South. We build, sustain, and connect a southern regional base of LGBTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to the current conditions in our communities. SONG builds this movement through leadership development, coalition and alliance building, intersectional analysis, and organizing. Mary’s commitment to Black liberation, which encompasses the liberation of LGBTQ folks, is rooted in her experiences growing up under the impacts of the War on Drugs. Her people are migrants of the Great Migration, factory workers, church folks, Black women, hustlers and addicts, dykes, studs, femmes, queens and all people fighting for the liberation of oppressed people. Monica Simpson is the Executive Director of SisterSong, the National Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to activism by calling her artistic and healing practices into the implementation of SisterSong’s mission. Based in the historic West End in Atlanta, GA and founded in 1997, SisterSong amplifies and strengthens the collective voices of Indigenous women and women of color and ensures reproductive justice through securing human rights. SisterSong’s headquarters is known as the “MotherHouse” and is a national organizing center for feminists of color. Toni-Michelle Williams is a community organizer and advocate for black trans justice and liberation. She serves as the Leadership Development and Programs Coordinator for the Solutions NOT Punishment Coalition (SNaP Co) in Atlanta, GA. With SnaP Co she successfully launched the Trans Leadership Connection internship program (TLC) in 2015. In 2016, the program released “The Most Dangerous Thing Out Here is the Police,” a report on trans people’s experiences with Atlanta Police Department. Tiffany Lethabo King is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. She is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) and a co-editor of the book Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press, 2020). ---------------------------------------------------- Co-sponsored by Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org Sister Song: https://www.sistersong.net/ Southerns on New Ground: https://southernersonnewground.org Watch the live event recording: Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Front line health care workers discuss waging an intersectional, anti-racist fight against Covid-19. ---------------------------------------------------- With states reopening around the country despite record levels of Covi-19 cases and a growing death toll as well as a national debate about whether public schools are safe to resume in-person classes this fall, it is clear that government officials don’t care about the human cost of this pandemic. Health care workers on the front lines of the crisis have been in the trenches, seen the devastation first hand and continue to organize against the inactions and callousness of the policy-makers. Hear from front line nurses and health care workers about their battles in the hospitals and the nursing homes against Covid-19 and why the fight against this pandemic is intricately linked to the struggle for Black lives and for dignity and respect in the workplace. What is the current shape of the Covid-19 crisis? How is it impacting ordinary people and health care systems and what can we be doing to fight back? Speakers*: Elizabeth Lalasz is a registered nurse at Stroger Hospital in Chicago, a steward with National Nurses United, and delegate to the upcoming 2020 California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee Convention. She contracted COVID-19 and then returned to work on a COVID-only unit that primarily served people incarcerated in Cook County Jail. Sarah Jaffe is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt and a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum. Also featuring: Tammera Campbell Ashley Payne ---------------------------------------------------- Co-sponsored by Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org Labor Notes: https://www.labornotes.org/ ---------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of Necessary Trouble: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781568589923 Pre-order a copy of Work Won't Love You Back: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781568589398 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/_74zCgTge9Q Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A conversation about abolitionist politics and transformative justice between Asian activists, authors and organizers. This panel explores abolitionist politics and practices among Asian organizers and cultural workers whose projects include prisoner support, anti-deportation work, disability justice, gender and sexual justice, anti-imperialism and anti-borders, and transformative justice. Speakers: Victoria Law is a freelance journalist that covers the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women and the co-author, with Maya Schenwar, of Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reform. She is also the co-founder of Books Through Bars NYC. Mia Mingus is a writer, educator and community organizer for transformative justice and disability justice. She is a prison abolitionist and a survivor who believes that we must move beyond punishment, revenge and criminalization if we are ever to effectively break generational cycles of violence and create the world our hearts long for. She is passionate about building the skills, relationships and structures that can transform violence, harm and abuse within our communities and that do not rely on or replicate the punitive system we currently live in. For more, visit her blog, Leaving Evidence. Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist whose research focuses on the racial wealth gap, credit scoring systems and the push for alternative data, and the intersection between racism, financialization, criminalization, and punishment. She has experience in Asian American, immigrant rights, and anti-war activism. Anoop Prasad is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco and also a part of Survived and Punished and Asian Prisoner Support Committee. Anoop’s work has focused on defending formerly incarcerated people from deportation with a particular focus on Cambodian refugees and domestic violence survivors. Sarath Sarinay Suong (he/him) was born in the refugee camp of Khao I Dang after his family fled Battambang, Cambodia during civil war and immigrated to his hometown of Revere, Massachusetts. To cope with the violence and pain of growing up poor, queer, and refugee, he became a community organizer, centering the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Sarath moved to Providence, Rhode Island in 1998 to attend Brown University where he majored in Ethnic Studies with a specific focus on Southeast Asian resettlement, resilience, and resistance. There, he became a co-founder and former Executive Director of Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), a community organization of Southeast Asian young people, queer and trans youth of color, and survivors of state violence organizing collectively against state violence. Sarath is also a founding Co-Chair of the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for Education (ARISE), an organization dedicated to working with Southeast Asian youth to organize for education justice. Sarath sits on the advisory board of the Immigrant Justice Network . And he is currently the National Director of Southeast Asian Freedom Network (SEAFN), a movement family of Southeast Asian grassroots organizations founded to fight against detention and deportation. Harsha Walia has organized in anti-border, Indigenous solidarity, migrant justice, feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements for two decades through many community groups and organizations. She is also the author of Undoing Border Imperialism, co-author of both Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration, and Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and contributing member of the Abolition Journal. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/GL2ZbqlJRQI Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

The Root Slam presents an all Black Latinx book release celebrating The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. Featuring performances by Elizabeth Acevedo, Nicole Sealey, John Murillo, Julian Randall, and Jennifer Falú and co-hosted by Gabriel Cortez and Tianna Bratcher. Featuring: ELIZABETH ACEVEDO NICOLE SEALEY JOHN MURILLO JULIAN RANDALL JENNIFER FALU TIANNA BRATCHER GABRIEL CORTEZ -------------------------------------------------------------------- The mission of The Root Slam is to create an inclusive, socially just space to promote the artistic growth of the Bay Area poetry community. We are guided by values centering the voices of Black, indigenous, and people of color artists; queer, trans, gender non-conforming, and women poets; working class/low-income, disabled, im/migrant and undocumented folks. For more, follow @TheRootSlam on Facebook, IG, and Twitter www.RootSlam.org

Making connections between the movement to abolish police and prisons in the US and the struggle for liberation in Palestine and beyond. ——————————————— A historic multiracial rebellion has exploded and sustained across the U.S. in response to the police lynching of George Floyd and others brutalized and killed at the hands of US police. This uprising has coincided with the escalating colonization and annexation of Palestinian land, supported by the white supremacist Trump administration. Organizers on the ground in the U.S. and in Palestine are using this moment to demonstrate the ongoing connections between colonization and modern militarized policing, and why in order to combat U.S. racial monopoly capitalism and imperialism, we must abolish policing, and all aspects of settler carceral regimes. This discussion will bring together activists and scholars to examine movements organizing to dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and free political prisoners as part of liberation struggles led by Black people in the U.S. and Palestinian people in occupied Palestine. Presenters include: Zaina Alsous, an organizer with the Dream Defenders Nyle Fort, a minister, activist, and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University Derecka Purnell, human rights lawyer, organizer, and writer. Sandra Tamari, Palestinian organizer based in St. Louis, Missouri and is director of the Adalah Justice Project. Randa Wahbi, former international advocacy coordinator at Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association in Ramallah. Co-sponsoring organizations: Jewish Voice for Peace (South Florida and New Orleans chapters), DSA Palestine Working Group, Dream Defenders, Adalah Justice Project, Palestine Legal, and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/dND8keciMFo Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A discussion examining the roots of the explosion and mass protests currently unfolding in Lebanon with speakers on the ground in Beirut. ----- Please join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) International Committee and Haymarket Books for this forum examining the momentous events currently unfolding in Lebanon, featuring three speakers on the ground in Beirut. The massive explosion that rocked Beirut on August 4 revealed the depths of the Lebanese ruling elite’s criminal mismanagement. The explosion and mass protests that followed come on the heels of a year-long economic crisis and popular revolt. Since October 17, 2019 the people of Lebanon have been in the streets again and again struggling to transform the country’s sectarian-oligarchic political and economic system. Now in the wake of the COVID crisis, economic collapse, and devastation caused by elite incompetence which has driven 300,000 people from their homes, the people of Lebanon are rising up again. What can we learn from Lebanon’s long uprising and how can we show solidarity? Speakers: Rima Majed is a writer, activist, and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her research focuses on social movements, sectarianism, conflict and violence in the Middle East. She has written extensively on the political economy of sectarianism, protests and uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq, structural transformations and unemployment in postwar Lebanon, and the importance of labor organization. Her work has appeared in a range of academic journals and media outlets, including Social Forces, Mobilization, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, Al Jumhuriya, CNN, Middle East Eye, openDemocracy, and Al Jazeera English. She is currently working on a book that looks at sectarian capitalism and the shift in sectarian boundaries in Lebanon. Lara Bitar is a journalist in Beirut and the founding editor of The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization that covers socioeconomic and environmental crises afflicting Lebanon since the onset of neoliberal governance in the 1990s and provides political commentary on events unfolding since October 17, 2019. Bassel Salloukh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut. He is co-author of The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (2015) and Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democratization in the Arab World (2012) and co-editor of Persistent Permeability? Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East (2004). Moderator: Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist activist and alum of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). She has organized around the question of the Syrian uprising and the relationship between Syrian and Palestinian struggles for liberation, as well as on anti-imperialism and solidarity with the revolts of the Middle East/North Africa region. Her writing has covered the repression of Palestine solidarity activists in the US, revolution and counterrevolution in the Middle East, Trump’s war on immigrants, and the fight against the far right. Shireen is part of the Middle East and Africa working group of DSA's International Committee. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Z2otEIX9Eu8 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks