Join us as we celebrate the launch of The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration edited by Brandon Shimoda and Brynn Saito. The event will begin with words from poet and concentration camp survivor Mitsuye Yamada followed by readings and conversation with Cathlin Goulding, Michael Ishii, Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Emily Mitamura, Paulette “Tkl' Un Yeik” Moreno, Carolyn Nakagawa, Michael Prior, and Anne Yukie Watanabe.
This event is co-sponsored by Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates and allies working to end detention sites and support directly impacted immigrant and refugee communities that are being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies.
Pick up a copy of The Gate of Memory here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...
Intro song for live broadcast: "There Is No Moment In Which They Are Not With Me" by contributor Patrick Shiroishi off his album Evergreen
Speakers:
Cathlin Goulding is an educator and curriculum designer. A former public school teacher, she codirects YURI Education Project, an education consultancy that helps PK-12 educators teach and tell Asian American histories. Her grandparents and mother were incarcerated at the Jerome and Gila River camps. She lives in Queens, New York.
Michael Ishii is a healer, artist, and community organizer. His mother and her family were incarcerated at Minidoka concentration camp and his upstate NY relatives were massacred during WWII. Much of his life has been devoted to the work of nonviolence and healing multigenerational trauma related to Japanese American WWII incarceration.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, and Mothersalt, forthcoming from Alice James Books in May. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Left Margin LIT in Berkeley, and her grandparents and great-grandparents were incarcerated at Rohwer and Lordsburg.
Emily Mitamura is a Yonsei poet and scholar of race, gender, empire, and film. With commitments to women of color and Third World feminisms, their work takes up archival, relational, and bodily hauntings in the afterlives of mass and colonial violence. Her family was incarcerated at Poston and Heart Mountain.
Paulette “Tkl' Un Yeik” Moreno is a civil rights leader, poet, and speaker. Her grandfather, George Kamachi Miyasato Sr, and her Uncle George Miyasato Jr, were incarcerated during World War II in Lordsburg, NM and Minidoka. Paulette and Harriet Miyasato Beleal, her mother, are journeying to share their vision of truth that reflects Worth.
Carolyn Nakagawa is a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian poet and playwright who makes her home in the territory colonized as Vancouver, British Columbia. Her paternal grandparents were forcibly uprooted from Steveston and lived in Magna Bay and Westbank before returning to Vancouver in 1950. She is currently seeking a publisher for her full-length poetry manuscript.
Michael Prior is a poet and teacher. His grandparents and their families were incarcerated in Tashme, a camp located on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples. Prior’s most recent book of poems, Burning Province, won the 2021 BC & Yukon Book Prize for poetry and the 2020 Canada-Japan Literary Award.
Brynn Saito’s third collection of poetry, Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press, 2023), was inspired by her visit with her father to Gila River, the place where her aunt, grandparents, and other family members were incarcerated. Brynn teaches at California State University, Fresno.
Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including The Grave on the Wall and The Afterlife Is Letting Go, both from City Lights. He had family in Heart Mountain, Poston, and Fort Missoula, where his grandfather was incarcerated under suspicion of being a spy for Japan.
Anne Yukie Watanabe (she/her) is a queer femme yonsei and shin-nisei nurse, organizer, peer counselor and writer living in Chicago. Her grandparents were incarcerated in Tashme and Lillooet in Canada. She is a founding member of Nikkei Uprising, a Nikkei group that organizes for collective liberation with an abolitionist and anti-imperialist lens.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Tsuru for Solidarity, and The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRd1HvGzSPk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Tarik Dobbs with special guests Julian Randall, I.S. Jones and Katana Smith, in celebration of his debut poetry collection Nazar Boy.
From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.
Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.
Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.
Get Nazar Boy from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...
***Please note: This discussion was recorded on August 8, 2024.
Speakers:
Tarik Dobbs (b.1997; Dearborn, MI) is a writer, an artist, and a Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Tarik’s poems appear in the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies, as well as AGNI, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Tarik helps run poetry.onl, and served as a guest editor at Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America as well as Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Tarik received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, and is currently an M.F.A. fellow in art, theory, practice at Northwestern University.
Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. His poetry and essays are published in the New York Times Magazine, POETRY, The Atlantic, and Vibe. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Julian holds an MFA in Poetry from Ole Miss. His first book, Refuse, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He was also a contributor to the #1 New York Times-bestseller Black Boy Joy. Julian has previously worked as a youth mentor, teaching writing workshops to children on house arrest. Pilar Ramirez and the Escape from Zafa is his debut children's novel. Follow him on Twitter!
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and essayist. She has received support in the form of fellowships, retreats, and residencies from Hedgebrook, Brooklyn Poets, Sewanee’s Writers Conference, Callaloo, Bread Loaf, and The Watering Hole. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. For the last three years, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) was selected by Newfound for their Emerging Poets Series. I.S. Jones is a 2023 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar. She is currently an instructor with Brooklyn Poets, a reader for Poetry Magazine, and is at work on her debut full-length collection of poems.
Katana Smith is a poet and writer from Aurora, Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, RHINO poetry, and elsewhere. She is a freelance writer and serves as Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University. Katana earned her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from the Litowitz graduate program at Northwestern University. She is a McNair Scholar, and a graduate of the creative writing program at Knox College. She lives in Chicago.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dMDPy4dTU0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join us for a discussion of how to maintain hope in the face of despair, with Hannah Proctor and Sarah Jaffe.
In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? In her new book Burnout, Hannah Proctor answers that question by drawing on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.
Burnout considers despairing former Communards exiled to a penal colony in the South Pacific; exhausted Bolsheviks recuperating in sanatoria in the aftermath of the October Revolution; an ex-militant on the analyst’s couch relating dreams of ruined landscapes; and many more. Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward—neither denial nor despair. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants have made sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organize at once, and to do both without compromise.
For this launch event, Proctor will be joined by Sarah Jaffe, whose forthcoming book From The Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire takes up a similar subject.
***Please note: This discussion was recorded on July 25, 2024.***
Speakers:
Hannah Proctor holds a Wellcome Trust University Award at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She is the author of two books: Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria's 'Romantic Science' and Soviet Social History (published in the Palgrave Macmillan series 'Mental Health in Historical Perspective' in 2020) and Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024). She's a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy, is a contributing editor at Parapraxis Mag and is web/reviews editor of History of the Human Sciences.
Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and the forthcoming From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and a contributing writer at In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Verso Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN5_vl2S2N0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Haymarket Books and In These Times for a book talk on From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, with author Sarah Jaffe. This event will take place at Haymarket House, and will also be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.
Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change. We are in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. What can we do?
This is capitalism's death phase, and this crushing daily reality its violent, thrashing excrescence. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for most of the world’s population. The marginalized and the vulnerable have been feeling the weight of this crisis for a long time, but it is increasingly pressing down on all of us. And yet we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed.
At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. In her new book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, veteran labor journalist Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world. In it, she argues that when we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.
What could this collective mourning look like? How do we slow down and grieve when everything about the world lashes at our backs and demands we move on? For this launch event, Jaffe will discuss all of this and more.
For this launch event, Sarah Jaffe will be in conversation with Dania Rajendra
Order a copy of From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire:
https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978154170...
***Please note: This discussion was recorded on September 10, 2024.***
Speakers:
Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center Fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. She is the author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the American Prospect, and many other publications. She is the cohost, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.
Dania Rajendra has been organizing, strategizing, and writing to knit people together across boundaries, silos, disciplines, and communities for two decades. Currently, she sits on the international advisory board of the Diaspora Alliance and the board of Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers (GLOW).
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEqThV9qCck
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org