Anna Moschovakis // Stacy Skolnik // Claire deVoogd
Please join us for a power-trio as we celebrate the publication of Anna Moschovakis’s new novel with special guests Stacy Skolnik and Claire deVoogd
Anna Moschovakis: An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth : A Novel (Soft Skull)
A formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new work from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis, whose translation of David Diop’s Frêre d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black) won the 2021 International Booker Prize
After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.
ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS is a poet and translator whose most recent novel is Participation (2022, Coffee House Press). Other books include the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, and poetry books They, We Will Get Into Trouble for This and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also translated Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and various others. She is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY.
Stacy Skolnik: The Ginny Suite (Montez Press)
'Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…'
A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.
The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men.
— Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love
The Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug
Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.
Claire deVoogd: Via (Winter Editions)
Poet Claire DeVoogd’s first book explores what happens to speech, history, and the future when approached from an imagined position after ending—after after—charting a path from an unreal “before” to modernity.
Claire DeVoogd has a capacious mind. Her poetry has the commotion of history’s frantic details and grand movements, and a metaphysical silence that is post-apocalyptic. Via is a road for visionary readers.
—Robert Glück
“A passionate eulogy for life on this earth, Via represents an Errand into the wilderness of our contemporary era. DeVoogd’s poetry and prose is in correspondence with the twelfth-century poet Marie de France whose chivalric Lais offer a cartography through our collective consciousness in these apocalyptic times via the “undertow and marvel” of language and history. “Words extend around worlds” and we go on.”
—Susan Howe
“There’s a remarkable agility in Claire DeVoogd’s poetry, a tension from line to line and image to image that is wickedly smart and wickedly spooky. Somewhere between “a cathedral of every pink” and “a moss so green it bleeds real blood” she conjures old souls into new bodies and fleshes out the hope that lurks in apocalyptic dreams.”
—Lisa Jarnot
“Near the end of Via, Claire DeVoogd writes of her interest in the ways worlds extend around words. When I read that I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. Actually, I’d already been struck by lightning a million times while reading Via, and DeVoogd’s worlds/words extension just crystallized that experience. Via is the closest experience I’ve ever had to time-traveling via poems, with Claire’s addresses to Marie de France leading us to Paradiso as Apocalypse and/or vice versa. The thing is, this book is insanely pleasurable. A scroll of refusals in hyper-inclusive stacks of couplets? Check. The sense of maybe seeing every painting everywhere all at once? Check. Total formal command in informal service of exhausted expansion? Yeah. I love this book so much.”
—Anselm Berrigan
Claire DeVoogd is a poet and teacher in New York City. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is the author of a chaplet Apocalypses 1-12 (Belladonna*, 2021). Other recent work can be found on Montez Press Radio, in Prelude, The Brooklyn Rail, Pfiel, and elsewhere. She co-edits Terrific Books, a pamphlet press.
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse vol. V
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume V)
Joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe!
Volume FIVE!!
Gina Chung
Tonee Mae Moll
Javeria Hasnain
Aditi Bhattacharjee
Max Fischer
Kindall Grant
Hosts
Kate McDonough is a queer non binary trans writer, organizer and performance artist. Their work explores the politics of place v. space and finding radical queer joy in the midst of an apocalypse. Originally from the Bronx, Kate lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from The New School
Kelby Clark is a poet and fiction writer, based in Brooklyn, NY but born and bred across the Hudson in New Jersey. Currently, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. Her work explores topics of race and Black identity, as well as topics like the myth of suburban bliss. She also enjoys writing about and reading to her cat, Mowgli.
We Go Where They Go with Michael Staudenmaier and Kristin Schwartz
When Dare To Struggle NYC read We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action as part of their radical book club they knew they wanted to go deeper into it’s lessons and how to apply them on our current terrain. So they invited several of the contributors to the book to share their observations. Please join Michael Staudenmaier and Kristin Schwartz for a great way to kick off the year.
Upcoming Events (& past events)
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For Our Liberation Film Screening and Discussion
Political Film Screening and Discussion
with For Our Liberation
Stephanie Cawley // Dawn Lundy Martin // Jameson Fitzpatrick // Chase Berggrun
An amazing night of poetry that you won’t want to miss!
Stephanie Cawley: No More Flowers (Birds LLC)
In Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers, poetry serves as a resistance against suffering—their own, their loved ones’, humanity’s. A protest against meaninglessness. An antidote. The poems in No More Flowers believe in their ability to affect consequences with language, while being self-aware enough to know how absurd that belief is:
“That was just words. You could make them do anything, but also it was hard to make them do anything. Kite against blue clouds. Tree with green leaves. Street sign cut off on one edge so it says Cum Street. This was the machine into which I poured my sadness. The words were dead and they were alive.”
These poems are a pleasure. And they insist that pleasure—and desire—are not an indulgence. They are a necessity to life: “I do want my friend to find / a place to sleep for longer than a few weeks. / I do want to put flowers in the mouths / of everyone I love and call it art.” The title declares No More Flowers, but inside the book, flowers proliferate. A queer, wild garden riots into bloom.
“Here are the layers of an exquisite desire, bared to the world, teeth and all. Blood and all. Queer as in: the death of narrative, the death of feeling as an explanatory framework. Long live our pleasures, our unruly beauty rendered illegible by inherited patterns of wanting. Long live the possibility of pleasure as a pathway towards an expansive sense of being, made and unmade at the site of skin against skin. Because we know our arrival is not a point on the horizon, but an endlessly renewable life force within us, between us, for me, for you. "One cannot know what one wants until one knows what wanting is," Cawley writes -- this is a collection of coming into life and living, even in the presence of death. Even in the presence of a void left by diminishments and binaries and a world intent on foreclosures. Reading this book, I came to understand "the future didn’t have to look like anything."
—Kazumi Chin
“The journey of these poems had me on the edge of my seat and always on the brink of seeing the world in new ways! “If there was a hole in the center of the forest / I knew I would be dragged into it.” Here is a book we want in our lives, poetry to return to again and again! Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers is absolutely brilliant!”
—CAConrad
“Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers is a book that builds soil / earth as viscous porosity. It’s refusal and it’s more generous. It’s a study of entanglement. A collision / a coalescing of memories, thoughts, experiences, edges rustling and shining amongst wildflowers / so close to the highway you can brush against them, pull on a seed. “Life on earth is about applying pressure / without understanding what it might do,” says Cawley. “At this juncture, I unhinge myself from time, gender, cheekbones / How embarrassing, to admit I don’t care about plot, just images of water and a somber face, or, / barring that, a savage, intelligent, feminine interiority,” says Cawley. You bring intentionality to the poem, your life, your politics / and yet / it can still get away from you / get wild.”
—Carrie Lorig
“I love Stephanie’s mix. It’s been killer for me since day one. Science fiction-y, mundane, dyke, smart, droll, dirty, surprising. As poems they just drop out, in a true 21st century way. This is the path & I’m on it. I say yay.”
—Eileen Myles
Stephanie Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions) and they are a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow. Stephanie’s poems and hybrid writing have been featured in Poetry Daily, the PEN Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and have been published in journals including Protean, TYPO, and West Branch. They work teaching writing and as a union representative for adjuncts. More at stephaniecawley.com.
Dawn Lundy Martin: Instructions for the Lovers (Nighboat)
A taut, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.
“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do,” writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for The Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.
Dawn Lundy Martin’s dark brilliance subsumes in the “tissue / breath that heaves, into a depth so black we cannot reach it—” echoing William Kentridge’s meditations on the artist’s dedication to the image via Géricault’s renderings of many decapitations. Martin mines in “a sewn language” where “defeat is inevitable,” and “freedom” is “near total alienation,” revealing hope in Instructions for The Lovers—a “subjectitude,” Martin’s singular voice, gesture, art: “fragrance like sun or metal—the I’s sublime coma— .’’ This is an incredible masterpiece.”
—Ronaldo V. Wilson
“I gladly and gratefully take instruction from a mind as fine and darting as Dawn Lundy Martin’s. Her new book of poems—a spinning, aloft creation, akin to Mallarmé in its suspension and hovering—is filled with randy, tender, radical, and history-making observations. She keeps shifting the angle of vision and articulation, so the reader can always be surprised and enlightened by how this alert litany, this poetic construction, this fragmented manifesto, arrived at its final form. This book is a sieve through which the future might be said to fall, with a sound like salvation.”
—Wayne Koestenbaum
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers, Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently working on memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Jameson Fitzpatrick: Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds LLC)
"There was the idea of love and then what."
“This book is a record of my thinking and feeling during my mid-to-late-twenties. Like any record, it is incomplete and imperfect—I do not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own. I think of this collection as a bildungsroman of sorts: the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode.”
—Jameson Fitzpatrick
"The experience of reading Jameson Fitzpatrick’s absorbing new poetry collection, Pricks in the Tapestry, (Birds, LLC), feels like tracing a map of exquisite points—the parts of us that are most tender when pressed. Fitzpatrick’s poems regard the sites and sources of hurt, desire, and disturbance with evocative candor. These poems pricked my own exquisite points, in the way that our deepest loves and most brutal hurts (sometimes one and the same) so often do."
—Alina Pleskova
Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 Thom Gunn Award, and of the chapbooks Mr. & (Indolent Books, 2018) and Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014). She was awarded a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship in creative writing. She teaches at New York University.
Chase Berggrun: R E D (Birds LLC)
Poetry. R E D is an erasure of Bram Stoker's Dracula. A long poem in 27 chapters, R E D excavates from Stoker's text an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage while wrestling with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.
"I tried to undress a mystery,” testifies the speaker of R E D as this haunting literary performance—somewhere between neo-Gothic burlesque and formal experiment in queer auto-theory—begins. Erasing Bram Stoker’s Dracula all the way down to its psychoanalytic minimalia, Chase Berggrun unearths a narrative not only of gender transition, but of the uncanny political and metaphysical transitions entailed by the metamorphosis of individual into chorus as well. By the end of this adventure in appropriation as self-disclosure, we learn that the “mystery” was self all along: “A detail in a pool of blood / the body gathered in an awkward kink / I dress myself in easy anything.” Rapt and unsettled, we readers find ourselves, too, both saturated and implicated in the sanguinary affair of desire, “drenched to a scarlet with want."—Srikanth Reddy
“I violate limitation” says the speaker in Chase Berggrun’s R E D and how can I help it, I love her to no end. This is a book that celebrates, no, reifies the power of erasure to usher in (re)creation. There are echoes of Hélène Cixous who, in Coming to Writing, says: “In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings. When you have come to the end, only then can beginning come to you.” The gifts of transition. The gift of a body becoming “a determined echo hammering away.” How my own body needed these “hands full of sound.”—T C Tolbert
Chase Berggrun is a trans woman poet, educator, and organizer, and the author of R E D (Birds LLC, 2018) and the chapbook Somewhere a Seagull (After Hours Editions, 2023). She lives in Brooklyn with her many houseplants. She believes in a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
Unfortunately Ariel Yelen needed to reschedule her reading. Check back here for more information.
fag/hag nyc book launch
fag/hag nyc book launch
with Max Fox and Madeline Lane-McKinley
— Dear M, Love M
The heart of this book is a series of letters exchanged between two friends in 2020. Fox and Lane-McKinley found themselves unable to work on a book left unpublished at the death of their other friend, Christopher Chitty. Chitty is the author of the posthumously published Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, and was a committed organiser and comrade. In avoiding one book, Fox and Lane-McKinley came to write another through their conversation as it unfolded amidst Californian wildfires, the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the fascistic flares of white nationalism. And, of course, grief. Remembering Chitty became a way for the two friends to make sense of the sexual politics of the long 1990s, that interminable decade in which they both came of age, both became imprinted by intimacy and its prohibition. The fag/hag emerges in their letters as a relation, at once a promise of love outside the privatised family unit and something vulnerable to capture when made to sequester anxieties about sex, gender, and the future. Before and after the letters, there are two essays, one by each author, which chart the prehistory of their friendship and their respective entries into the fag/hag relation. Together the three pieces speak to each other, as Fox and Lane-McKinley do in their epistolary register, and as they both speak to Chitty, the beloved and staunch subject of the book’s apostrophic address.
‘At once sprawling and compact, fag/hag illuminates the contradictions that inhere in the promise of gay communism: the ways in which queer resistance to the family-form doesn’t simply lead to its negation, but reproduces its limits in unexpected ways.
From within these contradictions, Fox and Lane-McKinley develop a gorgeous theory of friendship in the wake of its foreclosure, then shred it to pieces before beginning the analytical process over again. This is a work of avoidance — of work, of family, of mourning — but it is precisely through that avoidance that they conjure new forms of intimacy. In a time of generalized and uneven immiseration, fag/hag offers us a model to think with, not just against, our endless mourning.‘ — Dominick Knowles
Max Fox is a writer, translator, and a founding editor of Pinko Magazine.
Madeline Lane-McKinley is the author of Comedy Against Work (Common Notions, 2022), and Dear Z (Commune Editions, 2019). She is also a co-editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry
Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki book launch
Please join Marine Cornuet and friends as we celebrate the publication of Anna Gréki’s Algeria, Capital: Algiers, a collection of poems written during Gréki's imprisonment as part of the Algerian liberation struggle.
Anna Gréki (1931-1966) was an Algerian poet of French descent. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle in Algiers, in 1957. Algeria, Capital: Algiers was first published in 1963 in a French and Arabic bilingual edition. Algeria, Capital: Algiers makes this work available to English readers for the first time.
Along with Gréki’s poetry Radhika Singh, a science fiction writer will read from a manuscript that, like Gréki's poems, offers thrilling visions of a liberated future and David Iaconangelo will read a translation of at least one long poem by Miguel Hernández referenced by Gréki.
November Sun
That morning the sun
Used its public crier
Voice
What does it say and want
In the thick of burst
Shadows
It screams that it has plenty of love
To give and plenty of blood
On its hands
It shouts from the roofs
Of Algiers the White of Algiers
The Red
The humid joy of the day
And the cheerful bitterness
Of life
Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki is co-published by Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found, translated by Marine Cornuet, and introduced by Ammiel Alcalay.
"Anna Gréki was a particularly inconvenient pied noir—not loyal enough for the French colonists and too compromised for the Algerian nationalists—and so she was shunted to the margins of Algerian literary history. Nevertheless, it’s time she takes her place at the center of that narrative, and these accomplished translations constitute a necessary English-language introduction to this secret garden of Maghrebi poetry. Gréki’s poetry is electrified by the heady heights of the war of liberation, but arguably it finds its truest expression in her paeans to the wild hills and impregnable peaks of the Aurès mountains, where she was born and where she found a sense of peace which otherwise eluded her in her brief life."
—André Naffis-Sahely
“‘Nothing happens here but everything burns.’ From the prison where she was tortured by French authorities in 1950s Algeria, Anna Greki stays in touch, feverishly, with ‘this world of vulnerable flesh.’ Addressed to her friends and comrades in struggle, to the land and the leaves and the birds, these poems defy ‘the war, this male ax,’ invoking the future with ‘a trust so total / I can almost touch it.’ Marine Cornuet’s translation deftly conveys Greki’s intimate language of the senses, to ‘transcribe with words what is done without them.’”
—Omar Berrada
"How fitting that a bilingual edition of Anna Gréki’s poems should be published now: a French poet born in Algeria, anti-colonialist (imprisoned for that) as Algeria battled for independence, writing in French, like Kateb Yacine, to show her freedom from French hegemony, but also her freedom as a woman writer to forge a transcendent and engaged poetics."
—Marilyn Hacker
Oliver Baez Bendorf Consider the Rooster book launch
Foregoing the bad crowing puns to welcome Oliver Baez Bendorf, Jenny Johnson, Urayoán Noel, and Yesenia Montilla for an amazing night of poetry that you won’t want to sleep on.
Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster’s crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.
Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.
“In poem after poem [Bendorf] builds and rebuilds a body, a story, a desire that are at once familiar and strange, capable of brightness like any headlight but also capable of losing that light in their brokenness which makes us love them even more.”
—Natalie Diaz
“What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside.”
—Ross Gay
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster (Nightboat 2024) and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019) and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U.P., 2015). He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Publishing Triangle, CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Born and raised in Iowa, he now lives in Colorado.
Sinuous and sensual, the poems of In Full Velvet (Sarabande) interrogate the nuances of desire, love, gender, ecology, LGBTQ lineage and community, and the tension between a body’s material limits and the forms made possible by the imagination. Characterized by formal poise, vulnerability, and compassion, Johnson's debut collection is one of resounding generosity and grace.
Jenny Johnson is a 2015 recipient of a Whiting Award and a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2012, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.
Transversal (University of Arizona Press) takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.
Urayoán Noel is a writer, translator, and performer from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Noel is the author of ten books in English and Spanish, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam. Noel lives in the Bronx, is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, and is currently completing Neural Sea, a hybrid lipogrammatic work engaging neurodivergence, disability, queerness, and displacement.
In the book's eponymous poem, Yesenia Montilla writes, “How do you not love yourself when you / constantly survive your undoing just by being precious?" Muse Found in a Colonized Body answers this rhetorical question by populating itself with poems that range far and wide in content—observing pop culture, interrogating history, resisting contemporary injustice—but that share the spinal cord of unflinching love. As Rachel Eliza Griffiths notes, Montilla’s “powers orbit and intuit the lives of Philando Castile, Captain America, Christian Cooper, Karl Marx, Ahmaud Arbery, Eartha Kitt, and many more while stitching our wounded identities, memories, and histories in defiant poems of revision and joyous reclamation.” The vertebral odes of this collection at turns uplift desire, affirm life, celebrate protest, and condemn the violent greed of imperial usurpation that has produced the U.S. as we know it. Both in its criticism and its admiration, Muse Found in a Colonized Body calls upon its readers to rise to the occasion of these lyrics’ profound care.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and in Best of American Poetry 2020. Her first collection The Pink Box was published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. She lives in Harlem, NY.
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse vol. IV
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume IV)
Joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe!
Volume FOUR!!
As we sit in the collective heartbreak of genocide, climate crisis and an evolving pandemic, we hold that imagination is a key componet of social justice. The work of writers, artists, and creatives of all kinds provides joy and clarity in this semi-apocalyptic world. Join us in loving community on Thursday, October 24th and leave feeling enlivened and inspired.
With AZ Nowell, Rob Weston, Grazi Ruzzante, Agustina Van Thienen, Mel King, Kat Schmidt, Kristine Chung Salcedo
Hosts
Kate McDonough is a queer non binary trans writer, organizer and performance artist. Their work explores the politics of place v. space and finding radical queer joy in the midst of an apocalypse. Originally from the Bronx, Kate lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from The New School
Kelby Clark is a poet and fiction writer, based in Brooklyn, NY but born and bred across the Hudson in New Jersey. Currently, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. Her work explores topics of race and Black identity, as well as topics like the myth of suburban bliss. She also enjoys writing about and reading to her cat, Mowgli.
NACLA Teach-In on Daniel Jadue
Teach-In on Daniel Jadue
hosted by NACLA and the Solidarity Research Center
Please join us for an in-person presentation and a collective watch party.
Daniel Jadue is a Palestinian former mayor of the immigrant suburb of Santiago, Chile: Recoleta. During his term, he implemented many radical reforms including setting up a people's university, libraries, and pharmacies that sold medication at cost. Sadly, he's the victim of a rightwing attack on his people's pharmacies and has been incarcerated since June 2024. He is currently under house arrest.
You can read more about his case at the Corbyn project and the international solidarity campaign at the Municipalism Learning Series.
The goals of this teach-in are to bring attention to the radical municipalist initiatives Jadue implemented in Recoleta during his term, to bring attention to his unjust detention and incarceration, and to rally the global municipalist movement behind his case for freedom.
Invited Speakers on a Hybrid Panel:
Rodrigo Hurtado, Universidad Abierto de Recoleta (people's university established by Jadue)
People's pharmacy representative
International solidarity committee representative
Soledad Varela, Tricontinental Institute
Lavinia Steinfort, Transnational Institute
Kate Shea Baird, Fearless Cities
George Ygarza, Municipalism Learning Series
If you are unable to make the event please watch the event from wherever you are :)
Seminario sobre Daniel Jadue
Daniel Jadue es un ex alcalde palestino del barrio de inmigrantes de Santiago, Chile: Recoleta. Durante su mandato, llevó a cabo muchas reformas radicales, como la creación de una universidad popular, bibliotecas y farmacias que vendían medicamentos a precio de coste. Lamentablemente, es víctima de un ataque de la derecha contra las farmacias de su pueblo y está encarcelado desde junio de 2024.
Puedes leer más sobre su caso en https://thecorbynproject.com/news/solidarity-with-mayor-daniel-jadue/ y sobre la campaña de solidaridad internacional en https://municipalism.org/free-daniel-jadue/.
Los objetivos de este teach-in son llamar la atención sobre las iniciativas municipales radicales que Jadue implementó en Recoleta durante su mandato, poner de relieve su injusta detención y encarcelamiento, y reunir al movimiento municipalista mundial detrás de su caso por la libertad.
Max Haiven The World After Amazon book launch
Please join Max Haiven and a “prime” collection of authors as we celebrate the publication of The World After Amazon!
The World After Amazon is a collection of 9 short speculative stories, written by rank-and-file workers at the corporation that has transformed the way we read and so much more. Amazon's sci-fi propaganda tells the story of a company using cutting-edge technology to deliver a utopia of cheap consumer convenience. But its workers pay the price, toiling in dystopian conditions to create a future that will exclude them. What happens when those workers reclaim the radical imagination and their power to tell their own stories?
We will have copies of The World After Amazon available at the book launch and it can also be read or downloaded online for free, and is also available as a podcast and audiobook. For more information, visit http://afteramazon.world.
Stories from Rank-and-File Amazon Workers
In Ibrahim Alsahary’s “The Iron Uprising,” robots and humans come together in common struggle… and in love. Cory Gluck’s “Thalia in Albios” depicts one woman’s journey through a dystopian future, from terrified housecleaner to fearless revolutionary. What could go wrong if scientists tried to artificially enhance the empathy that people have lost in an age of techno-isolation? In Dartagnan’s “Relentless” we find out.
In Anneth Chepkoech’s “Life After Amazon” a young migrant boy dreams of creating an online retail platform that respects and values workers like his father. Pearl Cecil Sigur Ramsey’s “ANYBODY HOME?” presents a podcast from the end of the world, where corporations can even exploit screams of rebellion.
Several writers chose to remain anonymous. “Forever on the Clock” tells the story of a worker who quits Amazon only to discover the prison where he is being held looks very familiar… In “The Dark Side of Convenience” workers are kept so busy working for Amazon they don’t realize the apocalypse the company is helping to create. After Amazon’s fall, a local ruler uses violence and fear to dominate the island of Zanjara. It’s up to his son to find “The Museum of Prime” and restore the balance.“New Entry” takes us to the far future, where humanity has found the source of infinite energy, but is not yet free from the power of propaganda…
These nine stories are accompanied by an introduction to the project and essays by the coordinating team. Max Haiven writes of the figure of the alien and workers’ experiences of alienation.Sarah Olutolameditates with W.E.B. Dubois on the power of words to change the world. Graeme Webb reframes speculative writing as a form of play that opens the radical imagination. And Xenia Benivolski reflects on how, in both Communist and Capitalist societies, speculative fiction gives rise to subversive dreams.
Max Haiven is a writer, teacher, and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020), and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He led the Worker as Futurist Project, of which this book is a part.
Gathering Utopias III
Thanks to everyone that came out for the first two sessions of the Gathering Utopias reading group! Return or join us for the first time Friday Oct 11th at 7pm when we will be discussing N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” from How Long ‘til Black Future Month and Pinko’s “Analyzing the Limits of Accountability” from After Accountability.
These readings are part of Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. In conjunction with the upcoming Gathering Utopias concerts, we have planned a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary. For more information visit Art Workers Inquiry
We previously read for session one: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Evidence” from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements and for session two: José Esteban Muñoz’s “The Future is in the Present” from Cruising Utopias and Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water sections 17.36 - 17.5. All events at The Word Is Change on 368 Tompkins Ave. Attend one or all!
Gathering Utopias II
Thanks to everyone that came out for the first session of the Gathering Utopias reading group! Return or join us for the first time Friday Oct 4th when we will be discussing José Esteban Muñoz’s “The Future is in the Present” from Cruising Utopias and Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water sections 17.36 - 17.5.
These readings are part of Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. In conjunction with the upcoming Gathering Utopias concerts, we have planned a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary
We previously read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Evidence” from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. The last meeting is October 11 with readings TBA. All events at The Word Is Change on 368 Tompkins Ave. Attend one or all!
Gathering Utopias
Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future, presents for the 2024-2025 season “Gathering Utopias.” In conjunction with the upcoming concerts, we invite you to a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary. Beginning on Friday September 27 at 7:00 we will meet to discuss Ursula Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Evidence” from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Subsequent meetings are on Fridays, October 4 and October 11 with readings TBA. Feel free to attend one or all!
The Highest Law in the Land: Jessica Pishko
Jessica Pishko and John Ganz in conversation to launch
The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy
A leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics.
The figure of the American sheriff has loomed large in popular imagination, though given the outsize jurisdiction sheriffs have over people’s lives, the office of sheriffs remains a gravely under-examined institution. Locally elected, largely unaccountable, and difficult to remove, the country’s over three thousand sheriffs, mostly white men, wield immense power—making arrests, running county jails, enforcing evictions and immigration laws—with a quarter of all U.S. law enforcement officers reporting to them.
In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,” who assert that their authority supersedes that of legislatures, courts, and even the president. They’ve protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the “Big Lie” of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing.
How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were “above the law?” What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy?
Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding.
Praise for The Highest Law in the Land
“As this nation seeks to make sense of the alarming rise of far-right extremism as well as the excessive power and everyday abuses of law enforcement, Pishko’s latest study of American sheriffs is a startling must-read. As she makes clear, these threats to our democracy are inexorably connected—sharing not just insidious ideologies and ugly practices, but also extraordinary power and popularity. That local sheriffs drive this recent and most pressing danger is something that we overlook at our peril.”—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy
“Blending superb reportage and indispensable history, Jessica Pishko’s book could not be more timely. The Highest Law in the Land is essential reading for anyone concerned about the unbridled power of law enforcement in 21st Century America. An absolutely fascinating and harrowing read.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove
“Eye-opening account of the modern-day American sheriff”—Linda Greenhouse for New York Review of Books
“It’s an intelligent, compelling narrative assaying the influences of toxic masculinity, gun culture and rural resentment, and the empowerment of sheriffs who declare themselves the ultimate arbiters of what is legal in their jurisdictions.”—Los Angeles Times, 30 Books to Read This Fall
“In her new book The Highest Law in the Land, Jessica Pishko shines a much needed spotlight on the right wing extremism brewing in Sheriff’s offices across the country and asks the tough question about whether we still need this inherently problematic institution.”—Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing
About the Author
Jessica Pishko is a journalist and lawyer with a JD from Harvard Law School and an MFA from Columbia University. She has been reporting on the criminal legal system for a decade, with a focus on the political power of sheriffs since 2016. In addition to her newsletter Posse Comitatus, her writings have been featured in The New York Times, Politico, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Appeal, Slate, and Democracy Docket. She has been awarded journalism fellowships from the Pulitzer Center and Type Investigations and was a 2022 New America Fellow. A longtime Texas resident, she currently lives with her family in North Carolina.
In conversation with
John Ganz is the bestselling author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. He writes the widely acclaimed Unpopular Front newsletter for Substack. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Artforum, the New Statesman, and other publications.
Nat Raha Poetry Launch with Kay Gabriel and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Nat Raha // Kay Gabriel // LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Please join us for a night of poetry as we celebrate the publication of apparitions (nines) by Nat Raha with special guests Kay Gabriel and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.
Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.
“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.”
—CAConrad
“Describing and defying the murder of experimental gathering requires and allows syntactic variety, paratactic flare. What you can hear in Nat’s nonet9 is dressed to kill, extravagant, and spare. For all we’ve ever wanted, all we’ve ever needed is a weapon to share. In apparations / this is unconcealed, & open,, && laid bare. Seeing that we haven’t just been seeing things is rare”
—Fred Moten
“Like a sculptor releasing the figure from the stone, Nat Raha breaks and chips away at language to liberate and unleash the hidden, layered meanings that nest within the anguish that is english. Through the inherent restraint of the niner, apparitions both complicates and clarifies the contesting and lasting forces of empire, allowing us to “re/assemble[d] our/affections and solidarities/our cracked, efflorescent hands.”
—m. nourbeSe philip
“This is a book that imagines (and refuses to imagine) survival, in spaces that serrate recollection, that don’t require their occupants to be embodied subjects. Nat Raha is a brilliant writer who upholds and generates incompleteness as both ethics and terrain. Book as scream. Book as frequency. Here, in the book, we might ‘remember what we live.’ Not how.”
—Bhanu Kapil
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines, countersonnets, and Octet. Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.
An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.
In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.
Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She is the author of Kissing Other People or the House of Fame and A Queen in Bucks County. She coedited, with Andrea Abi-Karam, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (all Nightboat Books), which was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. The editorial director of The Poetry Project, Gabriel lives in New York City.
Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement.
In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of “survivor,” getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.
A writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of Village (Coffee House Press), TwERK (Belladonna) as well as the co-editor of Coon Bidness/SO4. Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center and at festivals. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium. Diggs has received a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Whiting Award (2016) and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She lives in Harlem and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College and Stetson University.
Lend and Rule Book Launch
Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities
Book Launch with
Sofya Aptekar, Dana Morrison, and Jason Thomas Wozniak of The Coalition Against Campus Debt
“This outstanding book is a crystal-clear analysis of how and why higher education got captured by the finance industry. It's also the definitive guide for those who want to free themselves and their institutions from the sticky trap set by Wall Street.”
—Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy: And the Case for Debt Refusal
Public higher education’s future is being held hostage by financial institutions and actors. How did it get this way?
Lend and Rule reveals the “shadow governance” of debt and credit in the United States higher education system. With sharp and hard-hitting insight, the Coalition Against Campus Debt exposes how institutional debt is a primary driver of university austerity, miseducation, and the deepening of societal inequality.
Addressing how our lives are entangled in a debt economy, they develop the analysis necessary to transform higher education in today’s neoliberal racial capitalist political economy.
Part theoretical analysis, part toolbox for organizers in higher education, Lend and Rule is an invaluable resource for anyone engaged in debt abolition struggles or looking to acquire a critical and transformative vision of higher education today.
Sofya Aptekar is an associate professor of urban studies at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is the author of Green Card Soldier (MIT, 2023) and a delegate of the Professional Staff Congress.
Dana Morrison is an associate professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and chapter secretary of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties.
Jason Thomas Wozniak is an associate professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department, Coordinator of the Transformative Education and Social Change Program, and Co-Director of The Latin American Philosophy of Education Society (LAPES) at West Chester University. He is also a long-term organizer with Debt Collective.
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: Dare To Struggle NYC (Discussion Group)
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution
Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group
On August 29st the Radical Book Club Meetings facilitated by Dare To Struggle NYC will be discussing Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution by Dan Georgaka and Marvin Surkin.
You do not have to have read the book to attend, but, of course, it’s great if you have. Copies are available at the store.
Black August Community Town Hall with For Our Liberation
Black August Community Town Hall
Reimagining a Public Safety
with For Our Liberation
The forum will focus on the urgent need to promote and develop revolutionary Black power. Our discussion will critically examine the growing trend of creating "Cop Cities" across the country, juxtaposed against the defunding of essential social services that have been proven to prevent crime.
Additionally, we aim to explore the connections between our local struggles for justice and broader international movements for liberation.
About For Our Liberation are a cadre of Black communists fighting against capitalism, bigotry, and imperialism in the United States for the sake of Black Liberation. Through mutual aid, political education, and addressing the material conditions of the Black Body in the United States, For Our Liberation is driven by the need for true liberation for all oppressed peoples abroad.
Note: Priority is given to our Black and Brown neighbors/comrades, but all are welcome. Masks required (& provided)!!
Steven Salaita: Daughter, Son, Assassin book launch
Daughter, Son, Assassin: A Novel
with Steven Salaita
“Daughter, Son, Assassin is a brilliant debut novel from one of Palestine’s bravest and most trusted intellectuals.” —Susan Abulhawa, author of Against the Loveless World
Please join us Wednesday August 7th as we welcome renowned Palestine activist Steven Salaita to launch his first novel. Daughter, Son, Assassin is a story of family bonds amid political betrayal that explores the drastic steps that a young girl will take in order to find a sense of belonging.
Fred is lost, confused, almost certainly about to die. As he traces his steps back from the desert where he has been dropped by soldiers of a repressive Gulf Kingdom regime, his nine-year-old daughter, Nancy, is doing the same from six thousand miles away in a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Washington, DC.
With his disappearance, she and her mother are forced to leave their comfortable house in DC for a new life in Virginia. Abandoned by their friends and desperate for answers, Nancy and her mother must acclimate to the strange world of suburban anonymity. As Nancy grows into adulthood, she pieces together what happened to her father and devises a bold plan to avenge his disappearance.
Unraveling an international web of deceit in order to find her father will take time and patience; and becoming a cold-blooded assassin takes commitment to a life at odds with everything she knows.
“At times both sensitive and incendiary, Daughter, Son, Assassin is a meditation on parenting, friendship, the push and pull of diaspora over generations and the politics of conciliation to empire—in the form of a thriller. Steven Salaita’s debut novel is a fabulous and necessary read.”—Kareem Rabie, author of Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Steven Salaita is an award-winning scholar, writer, and activist. He is the author of ten books about Arab Americans, Indigenous peoples, race and ethnicity, and literature, most notably Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes From and What it Means for Politics, and An Honest Living. He currently teaches at the American University of Cairo. This is his first work of fiction. He tweets at @stevesalaita.
Soledad Brother: Dare To Struggle NYC (Discussion Group)
Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group
On July 31st the Radical Book Club Meetings facilitated by Dare To Struggle NYC will be discussing George Jackson’s powerful Soledad Brother.
You do not have to have read the book to attend, but, of course, it’s great if you have. Copies are available at the store.
An Anti-Fascist, Anti-Imperialist Reading of Moby-Dick
A Discussion of Moby-Dick and Book Group Launch
Inspired by CLR James and Edward Said's commentary on Moby-Dick we are excited to present a talk by Matt Sandler followed up by a reading group facilitated by John Bohn using Melville’s novel to think and discuss the peculiar features of U.S. fascism and imperialism.
Join us for a presentation and discussion of what Edward Said called “the greatest and most unruly novel ever written in the United States.” In the 20th century, critics took turns claiming Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick was an inscrutably forbidding existential allegory or a stark depiction of the interracial working class.
Here in the 21st century, with natural disaster looming and the rise of a new labor movement, Melville’s novel looks prescient as ever. Matt Sandler will provide an introduction to the text on July 24 before we begin reading. We plan to meet to discuss the book on August 14th and September 4th at 7pm.
Matt Sandler is the Director of the MA in American Studies at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and author of The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolition Poets at the End of Slavery.
John Bohn is a writer living in Brooklyn and a graduate of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. His research focuses on the twentieth century literary left in the United States. He started organizing virtual reading groups among friends in 2020 and is excited to facilitate his first public reading group.
Copies of Moby-Dick will be available for purchase.
Andrew Wilkes: Plenty Good Room book launch
Plenty Good Room : Co-creating an Economy of Enough for All
a book launch with Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D.
We are excited for the return to of Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D. to The Word Is Change and look forward to celebrating his new book.
Pastor, activist, and political scientist Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D. offers this primer on democratic socialism, using the frame of the Black social gospel to give readers examples of communities working for the common good of all and to offer a vision for what an equitable future built for everyone might look like.
Economic inequality yawns as wide as ever. Capitalism is working as it was designed: replicating an uneven balance of power, constraining life chances, and limiting imaginations. Those of us concerned about injustice often confine ourselves to issue-by-issue activism. The end result? Owners, investors, and a politics of inequality win.
But what if there's another way to organize our common life--and what if it's as homegrown as sweet potato pie? What if we could become moral engineers who co-create the world we all deserve?
Plenty Good Room helps readers understand Black Christian socialism, a stream of the Black radical tradition, from the perspective of a Brooklyn pastor and political scientist's civic awakening. As the former director of the Drum Major Institute, founded by America's most famous democratic socialist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Andrew Wilkes mounts a challenge to the endless greed, inequality, and profiteering of racial capitalism.
Tugging on the threads of history and scripture and pointing to the work of Black radicals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Rev. Addie Wyatt, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Wilkes weaves a narrative of "plenty good room moments": times in which communities and individuals had sufficient resources, human rights, and beauty. He invites us to join a movement that a day-laboring Christ initiated as he organized the dispossessed, the disinherited, and those pushed to the edges of society. Wilkes also introduces contemporary efforts pushing for reparations, community ownership, participatory democracy, and solidarity economies. These stories show us that we can create a world of care and reciprocity by envisioning an economy of enough for all--one rooted in justice, equity, and the God whose spirit falls on all flesh.
"Plenty Good Room lays out in clear terms the hope of democratic socialism for a country ravaged by intensifying capitalism. This exciting read is written with such grace, wisdom, and passion, from beginning to end. My generation often wonders what will happen to the world we helped create. Plenty Good Room gives an entrée into the future." --Andrew J. Young, former US ambassador to the United Nations and chair of the Andrew J. Young Foundation
Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D., is co-pastor of the Double Love Experience Church in Brooklyn and the former executive director of the Drum Major Institute. He is the coauthor, with spouse Rev. Dr. Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes, of Psalms for Black Lives and the author of Freedom Notes. His work and voice have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Sojourners, among other outlets. He serves on boards for the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York and the Institute for Christian Socialism. Dr. Wilkes is a graduate of Hampton University, Princeton Theological Seminary, the Coro Foundation's Fellowship in Public Affairs, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
"These are apocalyptic times defined by the unrelenting, unsustainable, and unjust reality of growing inequality. In Andrew Wilkes's brilliant new book, Plenty Good Room, he lovingly invites us to imagine and co-create new economies grounded in abundance, in which everyone can thrive. May we all be bold enough to join the movement." --Rev. Jen Bailey, founder of Faith Matters Network and author of To My Beloveds
"In Plenty Good Room, Andrew Wilkes offers the biblical and theological foundations for economic democracy. Rooting his arguments in Black prophetic religion and principles of democratic socialism, Wilkes demonstrates that there is no distance between Jesus and justice. Plenty Good Room preaches the good news that ending poverty is possible. In fact, it's what God requires and what all people of conscience must make real." --Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, executive director of the Kairos Center and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
"In an era of diminished expectations and political disenchantment, Rev. Andrew Wilkes has produced a call for a socialism that is both moral and democratic. It's the type of work that can reach far beyond the confines of the existing left to a silent majority that yearns for egalitarian solutions in an era of extreme inequality." --Bhaskar Sunkara, president of The Nation magazine and founding editor of Jacobin
"Plenty Good Room is a call to action, a call to the altar, a call to return to a 'Black social Christianity,' as he calls it, that convicts us and compels us to fight against empire and capitalism. Scripture asks us to 'write the vision, make it plain.' Pastor Wilkes does just that: welcoming community organizers and clergy alike into a politics of abundance, combining a grounded socialist vision with a divine spiritual mission for us all. Plenty Good Room is essential reading in these times. The anecdotes, the stories, the teachings from both past and present will leave your cup running over." --Phillip Agnew, co-director of Black Man Build
"With a 'sanctified stubbornness,' holy hope, and fierce faith, pastor and political scientist Andrew Wilkes puts forth an expansive, imaginative, inclusive, and inspiring vision for the possibility of an economic democracy within a beloved community. In resistance to the myth of scarcity, he inscribes the truth about God's abundance in the world through a hospitable spirit in which there is always plenty good room for all flesh. Take and read, and you will be filled with prophetic hope." --Rev. Dr. Luke A. Powery, dean of the Duke University Chapel and professor of homiletics and African and African American Studies at Duke Divinity School
A Land With A People: NYC Jewish Elders on the Anti-Zionist movement for Palestine Liberation
"A Land With A People is a singular contribution to the decades-long effort to forge global solidarities against Israeli settler colonialism. In giving us everyday narratives of Palestinian courage and resilience, alongside accounts of a growing Jewish resistance to Zionism, the book offers a collective story of fierce struggles against racism and apartheid. It is a story that holds important lessons to all who have dedicated their lives to justice, equality and freedom." —Angela Davis
Please join editors of A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism Esther Farmer and Rosalind Petchesky for a powerful discussion of current organizing for the liberation of Palestine.
"By seamlessly and passionately weaving history with heartfelt life experiences, and intensely symbolic stories with candid reflections, this collection reveals the real wreck Zionism has created, shattering the mythology that Zionism has always hidden behind. In doing so, it courageously interrogates the crucial, yet often ignored, relationship between Palestinian liberation from Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid and Jewish emancipation from the suffocating, racist chains of Zionism. It leaves me with more hope." —Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the BDS movement
"This book is an invaluable resource in the effort to challenge the dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, meant to silence criticism of Israel. A Land With a People also helps in understanding that the existential struggle against a racist, settler-colonial system, can, and must, be undertaken by Palestinians and Jews together." —Huwaida Arraf, human rights attorney and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement
"A community of Palestinians and Jews committed to a future without Jewish Supremacy Ideology, and with Palestinian autonomy. This is a volume of Palestinian voices towards movement building and creation of a joyous future, and Jews listening and then doing the work of changing their self-perceptions and living our responsibilities. A call to Repair through Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, through collective actions to end Israeli occupation, Jewish nationalism and apartheid. This book expressed the dynamic relationship necessary to a fair, humane and productive life." —Sarah Schulman, activist and author of, among other books, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International
"Offers a path forward rooted in an understanding of a painful shared history that leads to a commitment to solidarity and justice for all people. Reading it is both illuminating and healing." --Rebecca Vilkomerson, Former Executive Director, Jewish Voice for Peace
"Regardless of one’s perspective on Palestine, it is impossible to read this book and not be transformed. After all, these are powerful, indelible, deeply personal stories of what happens when lies are exposed, truths are revealed, and the founding myths of Zionism crumble like a house of sand. The essays and poems collected here break the cycle of ‘conflict,’ demand an exit from a century of settler colonial war, and offer a path to repair, return, and rebuilding. It is impossible to read this book and not fight for a free Palestine." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
About the Authors
Esther Farmer is the director and playwright of “Wrestling with Zionism.” In addition to producing storytelling workshops around the country as a JVP-National artist, she has played leadership roles in the New York City Housing Authority, as a United Nations representative, and as a founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
Rosalind Pollack Petchesky (she/her) is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Political Science at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and more recently, the Charles A. McCoy Career Achievement Award. Dr. Petchesky is a JVP-NYC chapter leader, a classical pianist, and a kickboxer.
Dare To Struggle NYC (Discussion Group) on Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman
ACT UP: Let the Record Show
Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group
Please join us Thursday May 30th at 7pm for a discussion of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman facilitated by Dare To Struggle NYC.
You do not have to have read the book to attend, but, of course, it’s great if you have. Copies are available at the store.
TAMA Sunday Open Streets Kick Off
TAMA SUNDAY Open Streets
We are really excited for the return of TAMA Sunday Open Streets for 2024 and we look forward to enjoying the vibe with you!!
On several Sunday afternoons a month throughout the summer Tompkins Avenue is closed to traffic from Gates to Jefferson and we gather with our neighbors and friends to celebrate, make connections, and support the community. From children's activities, delicious food, music, dancing, and cultural activities, Tompkins Avenue is filled with joy. Tompkins Avenue with its Black women- and women- owned businesses has become known as a center of Black Girl Magic and these events help us to know our neighbors and to support and sustain these local businesses.
We know that TAMA Open Streets is an important part of keeping these storefronts and vendors afloat and that Open Streets enables them to employ BedStuy residents.
We also know that we will all be happier if we gather together with respect for each other and our neighbors on a beautiful day.
There are various porta-potties along the area closed to traffic (Gates to Halsey) as well as public toilets in the parks on Halsey, Madison, and Von King. Additionally many of the business have toilets (like us for example) and Shiloh Baptist Church has generously made theirs available. There are also lots of trash cans around, please use them.
When the streets reopen to traffic at 6pm we would appreciate if the hang is chill and heads towards home. We want the community to continue to support and enjoy the Open Streets.
And don’t forget to move your car if you have one!
No War But The Class War Conference
No War but the Class War
Historical Materialism and
Institute for the Radical Imagination Conference
May 31 - June 2
@ Long Island University - Brooklyn
Under the title of “No War But the Class War” the Historical Materialism/Institute for the Radical Imagination conference brings together numerous activist, organizers and radical thinkers for three days of workshops, panels and presentations in downtown Brooklyn (on the Long Island University campus). For a schedule go here
The Word Is Change will be bringing a selection of books (including some deep cuts they haven’t yet made it to the floor) on Friday and Saturday. Sunday we’ll be fully back on Tompkins as we Open the Streets for 2024.
Dare To Struggle NYC (Discussion Group) on Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly
Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group
Please join us Thursday May 30th at 7pm for a discussion of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor by Kim Kelly facilitated by Dare To Struggle NYC.
You do not have to have read the book to attend, but, of course, it’s great if you have. Copies are available at the store.
The June book will be Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT-UP by Sarah Schulmann is a BIG book and we have discounted copies of it in stock if you want to get started on it now!
Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt with Sasha Warren and Vail Varone
Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt
A conversation with Sasha Warren and Vail Varone
Storming Bedlam reimagines mental health care and its radical possibilities in the context of its global development under capitalism.
The contemporary world is oversaturated with new psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When they fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere.
In a radical rereading of the history, theory, and practice of psychiatry, Storming Bedlam emphasizes the utopian origins of the psychiatric revolution and its roots in the political and economic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Warren traces a double movement in the global development of mental health services from its origins through the 20th century.
Chronicling and comparing these movements, Storming Bedlam, subverts the divisions between social and biological approaches to mental health and between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. By exploring the history of psychiatry in the context of revolution, war, and economic development, Warren approaches mental health care grounded in common struggles against conditions of scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation.
“Brilliant synthesis and vital reading for anyone interested in a left politics of Madness.”
—Robert Chapman, author of Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism
Sasha Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. His experiences within the psychiatric system and commitment to radical politics led him to cofound the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized extreme experiences and network with one-another. Following the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health's connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies.
Vail Varone is a psychiatric survivor, fiction writer, and community organizer based at Brooklyn’s Glitter House.
Lampblack Lit on Indie Bookstore Day
Lampblack Lit reading and fundraiser for Independent Bookstore Day
with Naomi Jackson, Brittany Allen, and Simeon Marsalis
Independent Bookstore Day is right around the corner! We are so lucky to celebrate the right way with the incredible @thewordischange in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Join us next Saturday, April 27th at 3pm — featuring readings by @thenaomijackson, @amazongenue, and @etherealsimon. You can view their work in previous editions of Lampblack Magazine (we’ll have copies available)✨
ABOUT THE AUTHORS🌿
Naomi Jackson is the author of a novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill (Penguin Press). Jackson studied fiction at the lowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, Jackson’s writings have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Washington Post. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Camargo Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.
Brittany K. Allen is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in Epiphany, Catapult, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Kenyon Review Online, among other places, and her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A MacDowell fellow, her award-winning stage plays have been produced and developed in New York, Portland, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. She is currently working on her first novel.
Simeon Marsalis is a writer from New Rochelle, NY, who earned a BA with honors from the University of Vermont for his thesis on Jazz and American Nationalism and an MFA in 2019 from Rutgers University-Newark, where he was the Henry Rutgers Fellow. As Lie Is to Grin, his first novel was published by Catapult in 2017 and was on the shortlist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His short story, “The Exterminator”, appeared in the Fall 2021 Founder’s Issue of Lampblack, a magazine and literary organization he helped to co-found. Marsalis is working on his second novel entitled, End Times, and is currently a part-time lecturer in the English Department at Rutgers University-Newark.
Independent Bookstore Day & Libro.FM Golden Ticket Hunt
Independent Bookstore Day & Libro.FM Golden Ticket Hunt
Come on down to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day with us!
Get your Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl passport stamped (or pick up one for your adventure), see if you can find the Libro.FM golden ticket to win a years worth of audio books, and listen to three amazing readers from Lampblack Lit.
Dare To Struggle NYC (Discussion Group) on The Weather Underground: The Way the Wind Blew by Ron Jacobs
Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group
Please join us Thursday March 28th at 7pm for a discussion of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground by Ron Jacobs facilitated by Dare To Struggle NYC.
You do not have to have read the book to attend, but, of course, it’s great if you have. Copies are available at the store. (Copies of Prairie Fire are also available)
And mark your calendar/reading list for the upcoming sessions. (Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT-UP by Sarah Schulmann is a BIG book and we have discounted copies of it in stock!)
Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl
Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl, Earth Day, and Independent Bookstore Day
Save the dates and get ready to pick up your passport and see how many of the 25 amazing bookstores in Brooklyn participating you can visit. More details about special events coming soon, but you can check out the list of stores and start planning your route.