Some upcoming events
4/18-25 The Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl is back! Bigger and better than ever before.
4/29 On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland with Alex Werth and Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers. How struggles over Black sound have shaped Oakland’s culture, politics, and geography.(more info)
5/1 Ahmed Abdullah and Ed Hazell a May Day/Kujichagulia/Sankofa celebration ofA Strange Celestial Roadand the 50th anniversary of Wildflowers (The New York Loft Jazz Sessions) (more info)
5/7 How To Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza with Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi co-hosts of [Citations Needed](more info)
5/27 Fiction as Millennial Cultural Critique: Two Debut Authors in Conversation with Abigail Savitch-Lew (Livonia Chow Mein) and Daniel Pope (Go Help Yourself) (more info)
5/28 Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon with Jules Wernersbach (Work to Do), Radhika Singh (Earthly Playing Field), Anton Solomonik (Realistic Fiction), , Garron Charles, Juan Camillo Garza, and Francesca/Forza (more info)
All events start at 7pm unless indicated otherwise
On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland with Alex Werth
On Loop:
Black Sonic Politics in Oakland
Alex Werth,
in conversation with Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers
How struggles over Black sound have shaped Oakland’s culture, politics, and geography.
On Loop explores the role of Black dance music and sonic politics in recurring struggles over race and space in Oakland, California. Insisting on the centrality of sound in everyday social movements—from the mobilization of funk music and boogaloo dance during Black Power to the policing of the Hyphy movement in the 2000s—Alex Werth argues that Black dance music is not merely a soundtrack to or record of urban resistance. Rather, its very sound waves have animated looping clashes over development, dispossession, and Black freedom. Through studies of downtown nightclubs, Lake Merritt, and the Eastmont Mall—geographies rarely considered, yet critical to Oakland’s culture and politics—Werth reveals how the liberatory sonic politics of funk, hip-hop, and hyphy rap have been met with a repetitive "war on nuisance."
As both a means of empowerment and a magnet for policing, Black dance music has transformed not only Oakland's nightlife, but also its streets, parks, and neighborhoods. On Loop is a rousing encounter with the sound that moves urban life.
“The book’s title On Loop refers to the musical rhythms of funk and rap as much as the spinning of a sideshow car, a DJ’s record, a walk around Lake Merritt and the cyclical nature of policing. Through a sound-studies lens, Werth equates sonic presence, and taking up space in its many forms, with Black liberation.”—KQED
Alex Werth is a geographer, movement researcher, and DJ. His work exists at the intersection of anti-displacement organizing, policy advocacy, and public culture. While living for over a decade in the Bay Area, he served as a Curatorial Fellow at the Matatu Festival of Stories, Public Imagination Fellow at Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and co-curator and resident DJ of Oakland’s Good Culture. In 2018, he worked on Belonging in Oakland, the City of Oakland’s first plan for cultural equity and development in 30 years. His essays have appeared in Africa Is a Country, Antipode, City, FIELD, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Sounding Out. His first book, On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland, came out in 2025 with UC Press. With a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley, Alex now works as a policy and research consultant specializing in tenants’ rights and housing justice.
Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers is an Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia in 2024, Dr. Summers was an Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. She is the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City(UNC Press, 2019). Born and raised in Oakland, she recently led the Mellon Foundation–funded Archive of Urban Futures in collaboration with Moms 4 Housing, which was featured in the Black Spaces: Reclaim and Remain exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. Her forthcoming book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming a Black City, is under contract with UC Press.
Ahmed Abdullah with Ed Hazell and Pheeroan akLaff—A Strange Celestial Celebration
A May Day/Kujichagulia/Sankofa celebration of
A Strange Celestial Road
and the 50th anniversary of Wildflowers (The New York Loft Jazz Sessions)
Ahmed Abdullah with Ed Hazell and Pheeroan akLaff
Please join us for a fabulous conversation with with authors Ed Hazell and muscians Ahmed Abdullah and Pheeroan akLaff (who performed on the recordings with Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Davis and Oliver Lake as Paul Maddox).
The discussion will revolve around the 50th Anniversary of the Wildflowers Recordings done at Studio RivBea, May 14th-23rd 1976 and how we can use what we learned to move forward in the 21st century
In this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s.
Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.
Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions is a series of five albums recorded May 14–23, 1976 at Studio Rivbea, a loft jazz space in New York City, run by Sam Rivers and his wife Bea.
Author Phil Freeman wrote: "this set... contains an overwhelming amount of truly beautiful jazz performances, by names recognizable to almost anyone with a serious interest in the music... This music is composed, thoughtful, and artistic in every sense. The cliche of avant-garde jazz, that it is mere inchoate bleating, is repeatedly disproved here... This is an astonishing document, sonically wide-open to anyone with an ear for music of the spirit.”
AHMED ABDULLAH
joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and recently retired as music director at the historic venue Sistas’ Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn.
How to Sell a Genocide with Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi
How To Sell a Genocide:
The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
with Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi
A gripping exposé of how the corporate media fuelled genocide in Gaza
As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework.
How to Sell a Genocide is a thorough indictment of US corporate media’s role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitized Israel’s war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanized the Palestinian people.
Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonization of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the US media.
All royalties from the book will be donated to the Middle East Children’s Alliance.
“How to Sell a Genocide vividly and meticulously demonstrates the power of narrative and the powers involved in shaping them… Through painstaking documentation over a 12-month period, Johnson shows how anti-Palestinian racism among elite liberals and liberal institutions constituted “Moats of Rationalization” that primed Western audiences for genocide.” —Noura Erakat, Human rights attorney and author of Justice For Some
Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His writing has been featured in The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle.
Abigail Savitch-Lew and Daniel Pope: Fiction as Millennial Cultural Critique
Fiction as Millennial Cultural Critique: Two Debut Authors in Conversation
Abigail Savitch-Lew and Daniel Pope
Please join us as we unravel the themes connecting these two very different novels. Includes wine reception, audience Q&A, and signings.
A double-debut event, featuring Daniel Pope and Abigail Savitch-Lew who will share the spotlight for a book talk exploring millenial angst, fiction as cultural and political critique, and craft strategy.
In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, Livonia Chow Mein tells a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century. Opening, as James McBride (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store) writes, “doors to a Brooklyn world that most of us will never see. She reveals the convergence of cultures that is the real New York to life with flair and grace that make this an utterly enjoyable read.”
In Go Help Yourself we meet Corbin Moore, a twenty-something lapsed writer whose job at a struggling, off-brand spiritualist bookshop in Seattle meshes well with his regimen of smoking cannabis, binge eating, and doom-watching the news. That rut is interrupted by the return of his overbearing mother, Geraldine, a famous self-help guru looking for a guinea pig. Add in the daily deluge of Corbin’s deep-seated insecurities and body dysmorphia, the prospect of reunion with still beloved ex-girlfriend, and nonstop harassment by a murder of near-murderous crows, and you get a person most in need of help—but from whom, and how?
Praise for Livonia Chow Mein
"First-time novelist Savitch-Lew is on a mission in this ardently researched,many-faceted neighborhood saga of immigration, race, desperation, and aspiration...forthright, illuminating, and provocative."— Booklist (starred review)
"This is an indelible story of Brooklyn and the recurring tug-of-war between residents and new arrivals over the right to call the borough home. It’s a tour de force."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Savitch-Lew shows prodigious narrative gifts in this debut novel…A vivid, savory blend of family saga, cultural history, and detective story, rich with urban life and lore."— Kirkus (starred review)
"Abigail Savitch-Lew opens up doors to a Brooklyn world that most of us will never see. She reveals the convergence of cultures that is the real New York to life with flair and grace that make this an utterly enjoyable read."— James McBride, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
"Livonia Chow Mein is a true New York story, a vivid, empathetic portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood told through four generations of one family. Abigail Savitch-Lew is a generous and gifted storyteller."— Lisa Ko, author of Memory Piece and The Leavers
Abigail Savitch-Lew
is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and an American of Jewish and Chinese (Ashkenazi and Toisanese) descent. She has a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark. Her short stories have been published in The Round, Post Road, The Best Teen Writing of 2010, and The Apprentice Writer. Previously, she was a staff reporter for City Limits, an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellow, and an adjunct professor of creative writing at Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the artist Emmanuel Knight, her sister-in-law, and their cat.
Daniel Pope
is a writer and musician from Seattle. His debut novel Go Help Yourself is the winner of the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in the UK, where he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing.
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
Radhika Singh, Jules Wernersbach, Anton Solomonik, Garron Charles, Juan Camillo Garza, and Francesca/Forza
Upcoming Events (& past events)
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Colleen Asper to catch the sounds zine launch
Colleen Asper // to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice zine launch
Join Colleen Asper with artists Katherine Behar and Chang Yuchen, composer Julie Harting, and translator C. Luke Soucy for the launch of to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice.
This zine was produced as part of Asper’s exhibition at Baruch’s New Media Artspace of a four-part video which remediates a 2021 performance by Colleen Asper and Julie Harting. The title, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, describes the limitation imposed on the character Echo—to only speak the last words she hears.
Echo’s story is intertwined with that of Narcissus in Ovid’s original tale but largely left out of subsequent retellings of Narcissus’s encounter with his reflection. Asper instead intervenes to “see Echo and Narcissus as making up two sides of mimesis, reflection of the self and reflection of the other, but also auditory and visual mimesis.”
The zine to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice collects the score and script from the 2021 performance and responses from 22 practitioners across disciplines to the question: “How do you think about repetition in your work?”
For this event Colleen Asper and Julie Harting will share their contributions to the performance, Katherine Behar and Chang Yuchen will discuss their art practice, and C. Luke Soucy will read from his 2023 translation of Metamorphoses.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
Book Release with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
Please join us as we celebrate the publication of the latest poetry collection by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, the award-winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled.
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC queer trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It's a road map for survivors looking for something that's neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale - not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.
Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost a cherished friend and comrade and met their estranged parents' end of life.
This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.
Masks are Mandatory. Please bring one, but we will have some available
“This is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who always saves our lives, always steals us back to ourselves, always insists on the gritty everyday of survival. But in this particular collection of elegies, laments, spells and witness is Leah at their most June Jordan, their most generous, offering the grieving heart our grieving hearts need.”—Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's The Way Disabled People Love Each Other hinges on the question 'Who mourns when disabled people die?' This, as Piepzna-Samarasinha knows, cannot be answered without touching this inquiry's twin: 'Who celebrates disabled life?' Every bloody, intimate, elegiac page of The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is an offering to the gods of disabled vivacity and a bullet launched another centimetre closer to that which seeks to kill us."
—Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT and WATCHNIGHT
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs; Tonguebreaker; Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (all Arsenal Pulp Press); and Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press), co-edited with Ejeris Dixon. A Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Cordova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister, and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. They live in Philadelphia, PA.
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, New Jersey. He is the author of SLINGSHOT, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and WATCHNIGHT, winner of the 2023 James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets. Johnson was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and served as the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. He is a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.
imogen smith raw & zero poetry launch
raw & zero by imogen smith
book launch and welcome back gathering
with Aristilde Kirby, Becca Teich, Sarah Aziza, Alisha Mascarenhas, Malvika Jolly, Sahar Khraibani, Garrett Phelps, and Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough
A book of transition—poetic, political, religious—and its always radical implications.
Occupied with trans spirituality, the genocide in Palestine, and the manifold intricacies of queer love and struggle, the poems in imogen smith’s second collection, raw & zero, open up an unabashedly musical incitement. At the heart of this collection lies the tensions between the philosophical and the erotic. Language unspools throughout long form pieces influenced by concrete poetry, as the poet plays with a sense of shape, space, and symbols. With raw & zero, smith charts medical transition, a budding Islamic practice, and civic resistance, felt in the book’s themes of meaning-making, hope, love, lust, identity, and community alongside personal, regional, and global grief.
“raw & zero, in brain, braid & bract, is exemplary proof of the poem as a devotional node: arrayed with pristine consciousness, Kyger-striped like the fiery Costus flower, a double-edged sensuality like the late Sinéad / Shuhada, & the most mentally vasodilational sense of enjambment. Keep it open, imogen. & you too, Reader.”—Aristilde Kirby
imogen smith is a poet and transsexual. She is the author of raw & zero and stemmy things, both published by Nightboat Books. They believe in a free Palestine, a borderless world, and trans power.
Soham Patel The Daughter Industry
Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry—book launch
with Dawn Lundy Martin
The Daughter Industry:
A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players
We are excited to welcome Soham Patel as they launch their new collection (Nightboat), a genre-defying blend of poetry, performance, and political awakening that confronts the transnational crisis of sex-selective elimination.
“Poet Soham Patel joins the lineage of Shange, Lorde, and Anzaldúa in creating and naming a new form for womanist truth-telling. And like Zami, Borderlands, or For Colored Girls…this book cuts a new shape, ever-shifting. The Daughter Industry is funny, and swooningly beautiful to read aloud. It’s always surprising: hot, messy, breathing, erotic, laughing/sobbing—fully and fiercely alive in brilliant, heartbreaking realness.”—Brenda Shaughnessy
In a prismatic meditation on survival, Patel assembles a chorus of seven voices to sing songs of resistance and queer desire. Patel transforms medical language, pop culture fragments, and dream sequences into an unflinching examination of what it means to exist in a world that doesn’t want you. From yoga halls to ultrasound clinics, from Bollywood dance routines to ghost stories, Patel maps the daughter industry with her signature wit, prosody, and clear-sighted documentation of erased histories.
About the authors
Soham Patel is the author of The Daughter Industry (Nightboat, 2026), as well as all one in the end/water— (2022), ever really hear it (2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and to afar from afar (2018). They live in Blacksburg, Virginia where they teach at the MFA at Virginia Tech.
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.
More Praise
“The Daughter Industry is a fierce autopoetic in which cultural and sociopolitical scripts dance toward collision. Through a dazzling choral voice, Patel exposes the machinery built to vanish daughters and vanquish desire. Like an alchemist, Patel speculates, blends, and recomposes the elements until the truth arrives unruly, visionary, and gloriously singular in its force.”—Airea Matthews
“In The Daughter Industry, Soham Patel constructs a poetics of survival where each page feels like a laboratory. Theatrical forms, documentary forms, lipograms, redactions, concrete and visual forms, yogic forms: these experimental ways of creating serve as containers for those whose bodies circulate at the deadly intersection of technology, culture, politics, and biology. That there is pleasure in the sounds and rhythms and voices and shapes of this book is a testament to Patel’s vision.” —Daniel Borzutzky
“Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry scorches as it provokes the reader into considering the effects and impacts of the continued erasure of girls, women, and the nonbinary actors in this seven-part choreopoem. The fearlessly brown voices claim space to counter cisheteropatriarchal logics through the dazzlement of voice and the myriad forms erupting from this necessary, timely, essential book.”—Rajiv Mohabir
Spirit of Jericho x Prison Lives Matter Study Group
Spirit of Jericho
x Prison Lives Matter
Study Group
Please join us for a study group hosted by Spirit of Jericho, an intergenerational study group for organizers (who specifically organize for the freedom of political prisoners), and Prison Lives Matter (PLM), an organization created by politicized prisoners to connect organizing across the walls. We’ll be reading work by Kwame Beans Shakur, who is one of the co-founders of PLM.
Register to receive the reading material: “Kwame Beans Shakur’s Speaks to Harvard-Howard Law Students” and an excerpt from J. Sakai’s Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat
Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want with Danielle Chynoweth & Elizabeth Adams
Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want
with Danielle Chynoweth & Elizabeth Adams
in conversation Teresa Basilio Gaztambide and Esteban Giron
and performance by Margaret Lancaster
What tools do we need to empower ourselves and our communities to create a more just and desirable future?
We are at a watershed moment of rising fascism and rising seas. Yet, our ability to connect and collaborate in creating our societies has never been greater. The urgent question is: How do we build democratic participation everywhere?
Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want (Common Notions) is a guidebook for social change. It provides strategy and tools to create a more just and desirable future for everyone. It empowers people from all walks of life to analyze root causes of the problems we face and design actions, transforming ourselves as we transform the world. Stories of successful projects illuminate the book’s theory in action. Remaking Democracy teaches how to proliferate participation and grow democratic practices, so that those affected by systems can become their creators. It equips us to design the abundant variety of solutions our surviving and thriving require.
Join authors Danielle Chynoweth and Elizabeth Adams in conversation with veteran organizers Teresa Basilio Gaztambide (Media Justice) and Esteban Giron (Crown Heights Tenant Union, Tenants PAC) and multi-hyphenate performance artist Margaret Lancaster performing pieces by Susan Parenti, Mark Enslin, Larry Polansky and Elizabeth Adams.
ABOUT THE BOOK
An accessible and practical resource, Remaking Democracy braids theory, assignments, and stories of successful interventions to teach you how to leverage your expertise into a strategy for making social change in your work, organizing, school, or faith life.
Drawing from race and gender justice, radical education, and experimental art, Remaking Democracy invites your participation in creating the abundant worlds we want. It tells the story of interconnected local to global projects in media justice, housing rights, abolition, education, health care, and healing.
Our participation is our power.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND PRESENTERS
Danielle Chynoweth is a media justice and housing rights leader who organizes with impacted residents to build power through strategic interventions that grow healing and hope. She works to end homelessness as an elected official. She was the Organizing Director for Media Justice and co-founded the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. She teaches at the University of Illinois, School for Designing a Society, and internationally.
Elizabeth Adams, PhD, is a composer, teacher, and caregiver who has worked at the intersection of art, education, and organizing for over twenty years. She produces anti-capitalist music concerts, created pop-up political education spaces with Free University NYC, and won historic rent laws with the Crown Heights Tenant Union. She has taught at Columbia University and the School for Designing a Society.
Teresa Basilio Gaztambide is the Senior Political Education Director at MediaJustice creating programming, curriculum and tools to advance our ability to understand and respond to the media and technology systems today. She is a native of Puerto Rico, and a proud Brooklyn resident since 1996. Teresa was the Deputy Director of the Resilient Communities Program at New America, and as Co-Executive Director of Global Action Project (GAP), a nationally recognized social justice youth media organizations with a mission to work with young people most affected by injustice to build the knowledge, tools, and relationships needed for community power, cultural expression, and political change. Teresa is also working on her first feature documentary “Everybody Wants a Revolution,” tracing the history of the U.S. branch of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party through the lives of those who were radically changed through their participation.
Esteban Giron is a recognized leader in the tenant movement at the level of his building, neighborhood, city, state, and nationally. A long-haul organizer with the Crown Heights Tenant Movement, Tenants PAC, and the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, he was honored in 2025 by the Met Council on Housing with their Jane Wood Award for the strategy, courage, skills, and labor of his movement contributions. You can often find him supporting fellow tenants in Brooklyn Housing Court.
“New-music luminary” (The New York Times) and multi-hyphenate creative, Margaret Lancaster (flutist/performance artist/actor/dancer/amiteur furniture designer) has built a large repertoire of cross-disciplinary solo and installation works that employ electronics and mixed media. Performance highlights include Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, MoMA, Art Basel/Miami, Santa Fe New Music, NIME/Copenhagen, and the 7-year global run of OBIE-winning Mabou Mines Dollhouse (Helene). A member of Either/Or, Ensemble Ipse, Ghost Ensemble, and One System, guest appearances include Argento and the New York Philharmonic. Lancaster is passionate about collaborating, spontaneous dance parties, and cellophane. www.margaretlancaster.com
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
It’s 2026, can we find some JOY in the Soft Apocalypse?
If you’ve been to a previous session you know we can & if you haven’t come find some! Featuring Jaquira Díaz, Kim Narby, Deryn Mierlak, Rocky Halpern, and Anjali Krishnakumar
Hosted by Kate McDonough and Grazi Ruzzante
The Long War on Iran with Behrooz Ghamari
The Long War on Iran
with Behrooz Ghamari
In this moment of crisis we are thrilled to welcome Behrooz Ghamari, Iranian historian and scholar who spent three years on death row in the Evin Prison in Iran on Wednesday March 18th at 7pm.
In his new book, The Long War on Iran (O/R) Ghamari draws on two decades of political analysis to explore the history of US intervention in the region, focusing on the enduring sanctions imposed on Iran and the persistent perception of the Islamic Republic as a major obstacle to American power. Despite the repressive policies of the state, Iran has remained a vibrant society with active intellectual, cultural, and social justice movements. The book examines these internal changes and shifts in Iranian politics.
By challenging the conventional image of Iran as a totalitarian regime, Ghamari urges readers to appreciate the country’s diverse society and complex political landscape. He calls for a re-evaluation of how the US engages with Iran, advocating for a more informed, nuanced approach to Middle East diplomacy. At a critical moment when US policy is being reshaped, The Long War on Iran is a timely reminder that, if the US fails to acknowledge Iran’s transformations, both nations will continue to face new events―and the same old questions.
Check out his recent apperance on Democracy Now!
Behrooz Ghamari is affiliated with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. He was Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University from 2020 to 2024.
He is the author of three books on different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath: Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Iran; Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment; and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution.
“Brimming with insight, this book expertly demystifies Iran.”
—Vali Nasr
“Ghamari parts the dark veil surrounding Iran, allowing us to finally see through the fog of mystification and misdirection that has warped our perception of one of the world’s most dangerously misunderstood societies.”
—Jeffrey St. Clair
“The book weaves personal memory with political analysis, arguing that Iran is better understood as a fractured society shaped by trauma, fear and competing hopes rather than ideological fanaticism alone.”
—The Sri Lankan Guardian
“Behrooz Ghamari was a death row prisoner in 1984, during the Iran-Iraq War, nearly dying of Lymphoma. He survived to tell the story. It is also the story . . . of a country misused and abused, from within and outside.”
—Le Monde Diplomatique
“Blending personal experience with sharp analysis, the book invites readers to rethink entrenched narratives and view Iran through a more nuanced political lens.”
—The Daily Star
Backstitch with Marian Mitchell Donahue
Backstitch Book Launch
Marian Mitchell Donahue in conversation with Anjali Duva
"Backstitch is a splendid, irreducible work of art—about making art, about time, about memory, about the stars in the heavens, and maybe most of all about family." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers
Two sisters, Violet and Marigold, reunite at a retrospective of their troubled mother's art. Together they must confront the consequences of her ambition and the difficult, private reality of the family's public narrative. Moving through the gallery's rooms and through time to arrive at the truth of her life and death, the daughters unravel their family ties, the gift and cost of artistic talent, and the legacy that they must carry.
Please join us as we help Marian Mitchell Donahue celebrate the publication oh her first novel. Marian, who lives and teaches in Brooklyn will be joined in conversation by Anjali Duva, a co-founder of Galiot Press.
More Praise for Backstitch
“In Backstitch, Marian Mitchell Donahue unspools the haunting story of a visionary artist whose brilliance is matched only by her volatility-and the two daughters caught in her gravitational pull. Moving fluidly through time, the novel exposes the blurred lines between creation and destruction, love and madness. A gripping, compulsive read.” —B.A. Shapiro, NYT best selling author of The Lost Masterpiece and The Art Forger.
“Backstitch is a wonderfully intelligent and enthralling novel about the costs of making art, both for the artist, and for her daughters. Donahue has a remarkable gift for describing art and it is as if we too are walking through the exhibition, appreciating each of Alice's vivid fibre art pieces, even as we learn about the tangled history and emotions that led to this triumphant moment. I reached the last page with profound pleasure and deep admiration.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Road From Belhaven
“Grounded in the slippery pursuit of truth, Marian Mitchell Donahue's Backstitch wrestles with the very idea of making and memory, examining both the price of art and all its riches.” —Christine Coulson, bestselling author of One Woman Show
“Marian Donahue's Backstitch is more than a remarkable or noteworthy debut novel. It is a feast of exquisite language that brilliantly depicts the complicated mess common to all families and all artists. This epic tale of the Snyders is the perfect marriage of form and masterful storytelling and it will stay with you long after you finish the last page.” —Robert Lopez, author of The Best People
Singing for Our Lives
Singing for Our Lives:
A Zine Launch and International Women’s Day Celebration
Please join Annabelle Heckler and Laleña Garcia for a Story Hour, Sunday March 8th at 2pm, to celebrate the publication of Sing For Our Lives and International Women’s Day.
Young people and grown ups, bring each other to read a new zine and sing together because there’s power in a union.
Visioning New Worlds
RESCHEDULED to March Fourth
Visioning New Worlds:
A Radical Imagination Workshop
hosted by zulaikha
Now more than ever we need to harness the power of our collective radical imagination. We live in the imagination of the oppressor. We deserve to live in the imagination of the free. Through creative practices, connecting back with the earth, and connecting with each other, we will be calling forth the worlds we so desperately need to re-member.
a welcome from zulaikha:
i am a fellow dreamer, writer, Buddhist practitioner, trauma-informed embodiment facilitator, abolitionist, radical imaginal, and i believe we get free together. my work in this lifetime is to create spaces and portals where we tap into deep earth-bound, transcestral and ancestral love, to re-member who we are. through the multitudinous array of our experience here on this planet we forget that we are free and when we come together we are doing the work of re-membering.
through re-membering, we reclaim. and through our reclamation we re-imagine and build anew.
when practicing together we will center earth connected practices, trauma-informed embodiment, Buddhist practice, and radical imagination practices. these practices are offered in tandem with heart opening, and protection practices while we work closely with the intersections of power. one of the first things i teach in my courses or workshops is the intricacies of power and the systems of oppression. your inner worlds deserve to be spaces of refuge, and i hope to support you in coming back to your refuge.
i’m curious about how unseen beings, portals, time, and magic can support us as we traverse the path to liberation together. i am called to ritual and togetherness and honoring each others sovereignty. together we build tools to strengthen community with all beings because the revolution is relational.
i am a queer, gender-fluid, south asian, liberation worker. i believe in the magic that is in all of us. i offer workshops and courses where we get to explore what it means to be in deep relationship with all phenomena.
let’s traverse this magical path and embody liberation as we get free together.
Solidarity with Children Madeline Lane-McKinley
Solidarity with Children Book Launch
Madeline Lane-Mckinley
in conversation with Jo Aurelio Giardini
A SPECIAL MONDAY at 6pm EVENT! ALL AGES WELCOME!
We live in a world that is profoundly against children—evident in the genocide in Palestine, the fascist targeting of trans children, and the blatant disregard for the lives of migrant children crossing borders and oceans. It is a world in which climate catastrophe has become the new normal, in which children’s futures are by no means assured. What we need, feminist writer and scholar Madeline Lane-McKinely argues, is a politics of solidarity with children, one that sees children as comrades in our struggle for a better future.
Blending personal and political reflection with cultural analysis, Lane-McKinley examines the history of childhood as a system of private property in capitalism, showing how the idea of the child has been weaponized in the service of white supremacy and empire. She disentangles motherhood from the act of caregiving, tracing the possibilities of revolutionary mothering. And she critiques the parents’ rights movement and imagines what education might look like outside schools, considering how we might center children as we challenge the strictures of the nuclear family.
"Immediately canonical—requisite reading for any theorist writing in the field. It vividly articulates the precept that the bourgeois family is a privative force that limits collective possibilities for caring for one another."—Sarah Brouillette, Protean
"Solidarity with Children picks up discussions of family abolition and asks how this abolition can liberate children alongside women and those repressed by the patriarchal structures of family. I enthusiastically embrace Lane-McKinley’s radical vision for co-authorship alongside children for our utopian liberatory futures."—Kate Bugos, Full Stop
"Lane-McKinley brings in expansive readings from the Black feminist tradition and Wages for Housework to argue for radically changing what it means to mother."—Adora Svitak, Blind Field
"In a world that weaponizes the ideal of childhood, not least against children themselves, Lane-McKinley reveals how adult supremacy inflicts violence—from genocidal colonialism to the repressive halls of school. Rejecting mere protection and unsettling the bounds of childhood and adulthood, this book is a demand for a revolutionary solidarity with children through building a world of communal care. It draws on past and present activism to illuminate the radical politics that would empower children to become political subjects capable of mounting struggles in a world of climate catastrophe, economic crisis, and global war. Unflinching and visionary, Solidarity with Children is an indispensable guide for anyone committed to transforming the world." —Anne Boyer
Madeline Lane-McKinly
is a feminist writer, parent, and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times and Dear Z, the coauthor of Fag/Hag, and an editor for Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, and Protean Magazine.
Jo Aurelio Giardini
is from Vancouver, and teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College. They are working on two book projects: Separations: Communalist and Alter-Urban Imaginaries in 1970s American Literature; and Generic Operations: Gender Identity from Clinic to Culture.
Love Letters
Love Letters: Year 7
hosted by Roshan Abrahams and Mon M
in collaboration with Let’s Get Free
Love Letters is back! An annual valentines day reading of epistolary work and creative letters honoring June Jordan and The Temporary Sacred (from her poem New Years Eve).
Please join us for a lovely night of readings and the write some letters to some incarcerated folks in PA with The Women and Trans Prisoner Defense Committee in Pittsburgh.
featuring:
Deepali Zeer
Joselia Hughes
eae
Chanice Greenberg
Aliyah Blackmore
dash z
Ak
Sophia Gurulé
Tyler Morse
Black Abstractions: A Poetry Reading
Black Abstractions:
A Poetry Reading
Join us for a night of poetry from an all Black femme lineup. Black abstractions refers to an expansiveness within Black poetics. On February 5th, you’ll have the opportunity to hear from four Black femme poets approaching the page with their own specificity, reminding us that Blackness—and its expressions in art—contains multitudes.
Dylan Gilbert (she/her)
is a Brooklyn based poet, editor, curator, and educator from the Midwest. She holds her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and is a founding member of Saltlick Collective. Her work often deals with grief, girlhood, Blackness, and lineage. Dylan’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Maine Review, Black Warrior Review, Plumwood Mountain Journal, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere.
Kindall Gant (she/they)
is a Black femme interdisciplinary poet and New Orleans native based in Brooklyn. She experiments with visual storytelling as liberation bringing poems into conversation with expressive forms like film, visual art, music and photography. They have received support from Cave Canem, the Poetry Foundation, MASS MoCA, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Watering Hole, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Guggenheim, and Ma’s House among other arts institutions. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and appears in Seedlings, TORCH, 1619 Speaks, Brooklyn Poets, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, and Obsidian. Their book The Harlem Table is forthcoming from Phaidon.
Tangie Mitchell (she/her)
is a poet from North Carolina. Her work centers personal and collective histories of the Black American South and has been featured in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, No, Dear, Poetry Wales, Mosaic and more. She is a 2024 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, a Water Hole fellow, and an alum of the UK-based Obsidian Foundation.
Nicole Alexander (she/her)
is a poetess and educator based in Brooklyn. She graduated from Syracuse University in 2020, earning a BA in English and textual studies with a concentration in creative writing. During the warmer months, Nicole writes personalized poems for strangers in NYC parks for her social art project, A Poem, From Me To You. Her chapbook, Why I Love Dreaming, was released in 2024.
Sink or Burn with Cristy Road Carrera
Sink or Burn book launch
with Cristy Road Carrera
Celebrate the release of Cristy Road Carrera's ode to love & revolution.
In Sink or Burn, the year is 2121, and fascism has overthrown a once-thriving utopia. Amid the ashes of a fallen nation, Cheap Glitter—a queer, punk rock band—becomes the voice of resistance. As they tour across a fractured America, raising funds for the fight against a brutal regime, they navigate wildfires, sunken landscapes, and the terrifying laws of a collapsing society.
At the heart of their journey is CT, a lovelorn survivor whose romantic entanglement with a fellow bandmate—a survivor of a different war—complicates their quest for both personal healing and social revolution. As the band balances the weight of trauma with the urgency of their fight, they discover that love, however chaotic, may be their greatest weapon.
A punk rock anthem and a manifesto for the broken-hearted, Sink or Burn tells the story of a tortured artist’s evolution into a divine healer. Cristy Road Carrera, a punk rock icon and Latinx artist, weaves together individual survival with the broader struggle for liberation.
Eternal rabble rouser Cristy Road Carrera is a first generation Cuban-American artist, writer and musician. Blending anti-fascist principles with survival love stories—Road has spent over twenty-five years testifying to the beauty of the imperfect.
Her career began in 1996 with a self-published punk rock fanzine, sparking decades of illustrations for music, literature and social movements.
Forging an imprint in queer, feminist counter cultures with graphic memoirs, illustrated novels, and punk rock records; Carrera redefined her career in 2019 with the release of the Next World Tarot, a tarot card deck that envisions a world based on radical re-definitions of self-love and social justice.
Carrera has been fronting punk rock bands since her days of self-publishing fanzines. She currently performs her songs as Choked Up, making records and playing shows with the ancient punk rock ethos of passion before profit. Engaging with her world anywhere from Yale University to Bluestockings Bookstore, Carrera continues to thrive on the fringe of the mainstream, and the epicenter of revolution.
She is a gemini and works and lives in NYC and Miami.
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
It’s 2026, can we find some JOY in the Soft Apocalypse?
Turn up on January 29th as Megan Milks, Annie Tan, Kira Traber, Lori Lynn Turner, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, and Alissa Schwartz guide us.
Hosted by Kate McDonough and Grazi Ruzzante
We Pray Freedom: Prayers, Songs, and Organizing for Liberation
We Pray Freedom:
Prayers, Songs, and Organizing for Liberation
with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Dr. Charon Hribar, and contributors Steff Reed, Rev. Dr. Andrew Wilkes, and ana lara lopez
You're invited to join The Word is Change and the Kairos Center for this in-person book event for We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor.
Together, we’ll gather for an evening of healing, remembrance, and collective action—lifting up the prayers, songs, and rituals that sustain our movements for justice.
A book of prayers, rituals, and liturgies that grows out of communities committed to abolishing poverty.
Prayer has long sustained movements for social change. Ritual gives shape to our desire for justice, and liturgy lends power to our work. In We Pray Freedom, we learn from activists and movement builders the songs, stories, and ritual practices that keep them going for the long haul. The Freedom Church of the Poor, called for by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has existed in many forms; today it includes laborers, poor folks, pastors, organizers, and others bound together by a conviction: It does not have to be this way.
Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
is a theologian, pastor, author, and anti poverty activist. She is the Executive Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing in poor and low-income communities for the past 30 years.
Dr. Charon Hribar
is a song leader, cultural organizer, and social ethicist. She serves as the director of cultural strategies for the Kairos Center and co-director of theomusicology and movement arts for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. With more than two decades of experience, Dr. Hribar empowers leaders to integrate rituals and arts into organizing efforts.
Steff Reed
is a musician, organizer, and scholar whose work bridges art, activism, and healing. A proud Black man and compassionate leader, he models emotional vulnerability as a form of strength and community power. With over 20 years of experience, Steff is a GRAMMY-nominated educator and Billboard-charting artist. Steff is currently a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary pursuing a Master of Sacred Theology (STM).
Dr. Rev. Andrew Wilkes
is the cofounding, colead pastor of Double Love Experience (DLE), a Brooklyn congregation dedicated to the liberating ministry of Jesus Christ. DLE advances God’s love and justice through worship, education, organizing, and radical discipleship. He is the author of Plenty Good Room and Psalms for Black Lives.
ana lara lopez
is the Coordinator of Freedom Church of the Poor Care & Engagement for the Kairos Center. Born in Antigua, Guatemala, Ana has lived in various places that shaped her worldview. She holds a BA in Sociology/Anthropology and an MDiv in Spiritual Care & Collective Liberation.
Earthen Weapon: Brick Threats and Promises with Tamara Santibañez
Earthen Weapon:
Brick Threats and Promises
Tamara Santibañez
Artist Tamara Santibañez presents an incomplete genealogy of the brick in the radical political imagination, from the "first brick" at Stonewall, to the mysterious pallets of bricks during 2020's George Floyd uprisings, to the "reverse bricklaying" of students at Gaza solidarity encampments on campus. Discussing their own work as an oral historian and sculptor as well as the work of other artists using brick, their talk will offer a series of brick vignettes and considerations from firsthand encounters, archival research, rumors, and gossip.
Offering the brick as a way of seeing, Santibañez will discuss the paradox of the brick and brick wall, the invitations and limitations of a solo brick versus a brick in formation, and ask: What do you know of bricks? Do you know a brick when you hear it? Can you feel a brick as it's happening?
Considering the current flu and nurses strike this is a masks required event. If you don’t have one they will be provided. If you are feeling sick please skip this one and get better soon.
Tamara Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian based in Brooklyn, New York.
Their practice employs storytelling, archival research, tattooing, and craft-based sculptural techniques to interrogate the ways in which hostile architectures, borders, and coded languages are re/produced and re/interpreted on the body. They are the author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Workand the poetry chapbook Memory Lane.
Thanks to The Laundromat Project’s Create & Connect micro-grant fund that seeds and supports creative projects by cultural practitioners, community builders, organizers, and makers living in our home of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Uche Nduka & Erica Miriam Fabri
To Umber & Morphology poetry reading and book(s) launch
with Uche Nduka and Erica Miriam Fabri
We are pleased to welcome Uche Nduka, as he returns to Brooklyn with a new collections of poems To Umber, and Erica Miriam Fabri for her new collection Morphology
“‘Uche Nduka has long established himself as a master of the short, gnomic, aphoristic poem. In To Umber, he has woven strings of three- and four-line bursts of verbal melody into long tapestries of urban music. An “archaeologist at the mall,” “wary of world-weariness,” Nduka braids florilegia of observation and longing, jazzy micro-solos of dismay, desire, and delight. These poems are snappy, sassy, veering from high theory to low innuendo; they are shot through with a constant dark undercurrent of the crisis of the body politic, of the world as a whole—but warm with “a wild sort of tenderness,” alive with joy at “the fullness / Of the music of fuchsia.”
—Mark Scroggins
For Uche Nduka “the act of writing is an invitation to inquiry, argument, communion. Poetry is woven into the very fabric of the sensuous, the emotional, the political. My work leans into wonder but goes beyond just beauty. I let the poem dance in the light and shadow of all kinds of truth and experience. For me, the keyword is justice. The poems in To Umber combat stoic indifference and silence. I believe that the work of a cosmic lover is never over. In me the poetry of revolt has found its writer.”
"Where love meets language—a stunning exploration of bodies, both present and vanished"
Morphology, by definition, is the study of the forms of words and bodies. In her second book, Erica Miriam Fabri uses the formation of words—molded into poems—to celebrate and mourn various forms of bodies. The bodies featured as main characters in this collection include lovers, family members, children, ghosts, rats, jellyfish, skeletons, and snakes. While this book of poetry is set mostly in New York City, it also journeys to far-flung destinations such as outer space, the deep sea, and the afterlife.
Uche Nduka is a poet-pilgrim, collagist, and essayist presently living in New York City. He is the author of 14 volumes of poems of which the latest are Scissorwork (Roof Books, 2022) and Bainbridge Island Notebook (Roof Books, 2023). A NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry, his writing has been translated into Italian, Finnish, Turkish, Arabic, Dutch, German, Serbo-Croat, Romanian. His essays on music, poetry, mortality, politics, and travel have appeared in various online and print outlets. He teaches at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and Queens College-CUNY.
Erica Miriam Fabri is a poet and the author of two books: Morphology (Write Bloody Publishing, 2025) and Dialect of a Skirt (Hanging Loose Press, 2010). She has been widely published and worked on projects as a writer or editor for The New York Knicks, Urban Word NYC, HBO, and Nickelodeon Television. She teaches at Pace University and The College of Staten Island. She is also a Freelance Photographer, a New Yorker, and a Mama.
Be the Revolution: Jay Ponti
Be The Revolution
Book Reading and Discussion with Jay Ponti
Please join us December 28th for an evening of conversation, community, and movement-building.
The event will feature a reading from Be The Revolution: How Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders Movement Reshaped American Politics, followed by a panel discussion focusing on “Why the left keeps losing, and what it will take to defeat fascism and stop the climate apocalypse.”
in discussion with Stanley Fritz (Vera Institute of Justice) and Antonio “Tony” Rosario (Teamsters Local 804)
About the Event:
Author Jay Ponti—organizer, impact producer, and strategist—will read from his debut book, which has been praised by Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Mark Ruffalo, and other leading voices in politics, culture, and activism.
Jay has been deeply involved in frontline movements including Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and the #BankExit fossil fuel divestment campaign. He served as a top surrogate organizer for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and currently is the Director of Campaigns with Turn Left PAC. In 2024, he directed Leonardo DiCaprio’s SaveYourVote.org initiative to combat voter suppression targeting Black and Brown communities in swing states.
Following the reading, Jay will be joined by local organizers and movement leaders to discuss the path forward for the left, examining strategies for building real power, rebuilding solidarity across movements, and winning against fascism, neoliberalism, and climate collapse.
Panelists:
Stanley Fritz is the Director of State and Local Policy at the Vera Institute of Justice. In his role, Stan supports initiatives across the Institute in building and executing strategic campaigns to pass policies aiming to reduce the harms of the criminal legal and immigration systems nationwide.
Before joining Vera in 2023, Stanley spent seven years at Citizen Action of New York as Political and Campaign Director. At Citizen Action, he served as the organization’s chief lobbyist and spokesperson and led its local, state, and federal endorsement processes.
In addition to his work at Vera, Stan authors a newsletter titled Let’s Not Be Trash, which seeks to generate discussions with men about patriarchy, race, and politics through essays, podcasts, and music.
Antonio “Tony” Rosario
Lead Organizer, Teamsters Local 804
Anthony “Tony” Rosario is a veteran Teamsters organizer based in New York and serves as the New York market lead, not the entire Northeast. He has more than three decades in the labor movement, with 31 years of organizing experience.
Tony began as a UPS worker and was a striker in the historic 1997 UPS strike at just 22 years old. He later became a UPS driver and then a full-time organizer. He was a leader in the landmark 2023 UPS contract campaign and is now helping lead the charge to organize Amazon delivery workers in New York City.
He is an active member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and continues to play a key role in major union organizing campaigns across the region.
The evening will include a live Q&A and will close with a brief open share-out. Local activists are invited to share about their organizing efforts, campaigns, and ways to get involved.
★ PRAISE FOR BE THE REVOLUTION ★
“Be The Revolution offers important insights into some of the most significant developments in modern America, based on intimate knowledge and direct participation.”
— Noam Chomsky
“We should thank Jay for his life’s work. As an organizer, he is a wonder to watch in action. This accounting of events of the last ten years is a profound and seismic piece of American political and cultural history that has gone all but unnoticed in the mainstream. Be The Revolution is not about a battle of right or left, but the battle for humanity and the natural world. The timing of this book couldn’t be more right, nor the message more on point. Ken Burns should do a doc on this!”
— Mark Ruffalo
“Jay Ponti is a legendary long-distance revolutionary thinker and activist whose vision, analysis, and courage is a beacon of hope in our bleak times. Don’t miss this jewel of a book!”
— Dr. Cornel West
“Wopila (Thank you) for writing the blow-by-blow actions of the war we faced at the Oceti Sakowin Camp (Standing Rock). Jay Ponti had great influence on the two Declarations written at Oceti Sakowin, particularly the Divestment Treaty among Nations. The First Declaration defies the Doctrine of Discovery and illegal actions used by it. The second called for divestment by countries from fossil fuels, especially by DAPL and all other oil corporations. Thank you for your written words.”
— Phyllis Young, American Indian Rights Activist
YEET! Poetry Launch with jason b crawford
jason b. crawford launches YEET!
with DeeSoul Carson and Jayson P. Smith
Afrofuturist poetry that envisions Black people finding new worlds of freedom.
Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one.
YEET! is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Sawako Nakasayu.
About the poets
jason b. crawford (He/They) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025. They have been published in Poetry Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.
DeeSoul Carson is a poet & educator and hosts the O, Word? podcast. A Stanford alum, his work is featured in Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, The Offing, & elsewhere. For his work, DeeSoul has received a National Endowment for the Arts and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the NYU MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com
Jayson P. Smith is a poet, performance artist, curator & educator from the Bronx. Most recently a 2024 Hawthornden Brooklyn Writer in Residence, J's poetry has received support from NYFA, The Poetry Project, and Callaloo, among others. Recent poems have been published in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, field meridians, & html.review. Their performance work has been featured at JACK, Center for Performance Research, and The Guggenheim. Jayson founded NOMAD Readings in 2016, which they continue to host and curate. Jayson is currently a dancer with J. Bouey Dance Projects & Asę Dance Theater. Find them at www.jaysonpsmith.com.
Police Against the Movement
Joshua Clark Davis in conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika
Police Against the Movement Brooklyn Book Launch
Please join us as we help launch Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back by Joshua Clark Davis in conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika, Thursday November 6th.
Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, activists confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing department headquarters, and blocking traffic to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at derailing their movement.
“This is a civil rights story that few know. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Americans built potent grassroots movements to make this nation a more just society. Police attempts to shut down their efforts have been relentless and consistently denied and covered up. But there has always been determined activism to counter such police abuse, and to demand accountability. Joshua Clark Davis has rescued this history powerfully in this must-read book.” Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“When I was a child, my parents—both civil rights organizers—shared their suspicions that police were spying on our family and trying to destroy the Black freedom movement. In brilliant, harrowing detail, Joshua Clark Davis reveals how right they were. This lucid account exposes a chapter of American history that many hope to hide but is more relevant than ever in today’s political climate.” James Forman, Jr., Professor at Yale Law School and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own
Joshua Clark Davis is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore and the author of Police Against The Movement and From Head Shops to Whole Foods
His research has earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program. I've written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Washington Post, and my work has been highlighted in The New York Times, CNN, and Time.
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Alongside his scholarship and teaching, disciplinary service on the intersections of social justice and media, Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. He has written in scholarly venues such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, as well as public venues such as The Intercept, Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE.
The Encampments Screening+Discussion
The Encampments
Screening and Discussion
“From Executive Producer Macklemore, The Encampments offers an urgent, intimate portrait of America’s student movement, ignited at Columbia University as students protested their universities’ ties to the war on Gaza. Their actions sparked a nationwide uprising, with encampments spreading across hundreds of campuses. Featuring detained activist Mahmoud Khalil, alongside professors, whistleblowers, and organizers, the film captures the deeper stakes of a historic moment that continues to reverberate across the globe.”
Please join us for a film screening and discussion as we organize to stop the genocide and raise funds for Palestine.
DATE TBA Joy James in conversation with Jasmine Araujo
This event is being rescheduled.
Please check back for the NEW DATE
The Institute for Anarchist Studies present
Joy James in conversation with Jasmine Araujo
Join us for an evening of radical dialogue and political education with Dr. Joy James and Jasmine Araujo, presented by the Institute for Anarchist Studies on Tuesday (yes Tuesday), October 14th at 7pm.
Drawing on the recently published Confronting Counterinsurgency and Beyond Cop Cities, the discussion will address how organizers can move forward under increasing fascism and how we can stick past anarchist history to this present political movement.
Joy James is a political philosopher who works with organizers. Her books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her edited volumes include Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons and ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures.
Jasmine Araujo is currently a writer acquiring her MFA in fiction at New York University. She founded Southern Solidarity, a grassroots network that distributes 500 meals daily across two cities. She has written on liberatory mutual aid for Roar Magazine and is currently working on a novel that fictionalizes social death.
The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), established in 1996 to support the development of anarchism, is a grant-giving organization for radical writers and translators worldwide. To date, we have funded well over a hundred projects by authors from countries around the world. Equally important, we publish the Anarchist Interventions book series in collaboration with AK Press and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, the print and online journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, the Lexicon pamphlet series, and an Anarchist Imaginations series of books in collaboration with AK Press that began with Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. We organize educational events and in the past, the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference. The IAS is part of a larger movement to radically transform society. We are internally democratic and work in solidarity with people around the globe who share our values.
About Confronting Counterinsurgency: As we step into an era of rising fascism and normalized genocide, Confronting Counterinsurgency: Cop Cities and Democracy's Terrorsis an invaluable contribution to the fightback.
Joy James brings together the voices of frontline activists, artists, and organizers from movements against militarism and state violence in the USA, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Palestine, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and within prison walls. The book includes accessible and revealing discussions of the role of institutions, universities and nonprofit organizations in the suppression of radical movements. It introduces and analyzes contemporary militarized policing projects like Cop City, ICE, and the School of the Americas, and links them to historical and contemporary settler colonialism and slavery.
Made as an offering of revolutionary love, Confronting Counterinsurgency will be a crucial tool for deepening and radicalizing our analysis and learning from each other's movements, in order to strengthen our resistance and unite to fight for a better world.
Reading plus cake with Mary Paula Hunter (MPH)
Please join us for a reading by performance artist Mary Paula Hunter (MPH) from her new book Can I Have a Hug First
And you won’t want to miss the cake made by Peter Hunter Meckel
CAN I HAVE A HUG FIRST? is a short story collection born out of author Mary Paula Hunter's career as a performance artist. Her monologues turned short stories feature midlife adults struggling to align their crazy minds with an equally crazy world. Hilarious and tragic in a high-energy mix, these stories will get the reader questioning what came first- the whacked mind or the whacked world?
Mary Paula Hunter is a writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. She received early praise for her writing when as a dancer and choreographer, she told stories about her eccentric Midwestern family while she danced.
Laurie Stone, in the now-defunct VILLAGE VOICE wrote that Mary Paula’s writing was brilliant. Jennifer Dunning in THE NEW YORK TIMES also praised her hybrid work, especially the honest storytelling. Finally the writing won out… although she still creates dances (mainly in her kitchen), and works on performance art projects.
The NYT writes: “Peter Hunter Meckel, 36, a Brooklyn-based baker inspired by the grandeur of Victorian-era sweets, uses chiffon in his outsize sculptural cakes adorned with edible strings of pearls and portraits of imaginary duchesses. Creating his signature sweets — which he’s made for weddings and fashion world parties — required a fair amount of trial and error. Whipping egg whites to just the right frothiness for maximum height takes practice, he says, and, because chiffon is prone to collapsing under weight, layered cakes can require meticulous engineering, including reinforcement with dowels and cardboard. Still, Meckel is drawn to chiffon’s airy delicacy and notes that its sugar-to-flour ratio is lower than that of traditional butter cakes. “A lot of desserts are just so sweet you can’t eat very much of them,” he says. “This is a nice change of pace.”
Duvall, Shelley by Laura Henriksen Book Launch
Laura Henriksen // Bahaar Ahsan // Mel Elberg // Teline Trần
An overlap of place, a link in times, Laura Henriksen’s Duvall, Shelley is an invitation to come over, to watch a movie, to hold a seánce that calls on a star. A lyric reflection on desire, decay, resurrection and survival. An index for monsters and their fans.
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Laura Henriksen is the author of Laura’s Desires (Nightboat, 2024) and Duvall, Shelley (Newest York, 2025). Her writing can be found in LitHub, shitwonder, and other places. She lives in Bed-Stuy, Lenapehoking and teaches writing at Pratt Institute. She worked for a long time at the Poetry Project.
Bahaar Ahsan is a poet from the Bay Area living in New York City. Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s). She is the author of Gay Girl Hyacinth (Eyelet 2021) and work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books), and elsewhere.
Mel Elberg is a genderqueer poet and artist working across print, performance, video, memory, games, and long-term collaborative endeavors.
Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn and the Development Manager at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. Their work appears in Social Text Online, No, Dear Magazine, The Poetry Project, diaCRITICS, and MONO NO AWARE. Their first chapbook is Ad Học, published with Wendy's Subway (2023).
Leopoldina Fortunati and Sarah Leonard
Leopoldina Fortunati
in conversation with Sarah Leonard
Please join us for a discussion of the new edition of Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso 2025) as we explore the work’s implications for the politics of reproduction in an age of austerity and counter-revolution.
Emerging from the great social upheavals that challenged the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Fortunati’s work is a crucial contribution to contemporary discussions of social reproduction. The Arcana unveils the hidden structures behind the reproduction of the labor force, exposing capitalism's reliance on unpaid, often invisible reproductive labor—primarily performed by women. Combining Marxist critical political economy with feminist theory, her approach demonstrates that care, domestic work, and sexual labor are integral to capitalist production, positioning women as strategic actors in the composition of revolutionary class forces. Ultimately, it demands radical social change to value and liberate reproductive labor from capitalist exploitation. Fortunati will be in conversation with Sarah Leonard.
Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.
Sarah Leonard is the editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. Leonard is a contributing editor to Dissent and the Nation, and her writing has been widely published.
About the book
Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.
Praise for The Arcana of Reproduction
“The Arcana of Reproduction is a true tour de force, unique both in the world of Marxism and Feminism. Whereas Marxist-Feminists have generally only elaborated on the significance of Marx’s work for understanding women’s oppression and exploitation, Fortunati ‘sweeps away’ our common sense notions of production and reproduction by testing Marxian categories through their unorthodox application to the realm of reproduction. The result is a painstaking analysis that explores these two interlocking spheres as both interdependent and different—radically unsettling our understanding of both.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch
“This excellent edition, wonderfully edited and translated, with insightful supplementary texts by Federici and the author, demonstrates the contemporary importance of this classic feminist text.”
—Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies
“The Arcana of Reproduction is a must-read because it is an at once singular and path-breaking contribution to Marxist feminist theorizations of the capitalist production/reproduction system and because of the powerful estrangement—from domestic labor, from the institution of the heteropatriarchal family, from the gendered ideologies of work—that it continues to provoke.”
—Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
Come on out for the next edition of Joy in the Soft Apocalypse because we definitely need some joy in this apocalypse!! Your hosts have assembled a great line up guaranteed to create a night of joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe. Fans of Rocky Horror will not want to miss.
with readings by:
Heather Maria Acs
Emily Elkins
Deena El Genaidi
Margot Atwell
Jon Meharg
Dare Campbell
and your hosts Kate McDonough and Grazi Ruzzante
Brooklyn Book Festival
We’ll be tabling September 21st at the Brooklyn Book Festival so come see us and a ton of other Brooklyn bookstores and publishers. There will be a TON of FREE AUTHOR READINGS too so keep an eye on the schedule and we’ll see you there.