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.

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

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.

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?

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.”

Laura Henriksen // Bahaar Ahsan // Mel Elberg // Teline Trần

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

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

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

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.

https://brooklynbookfestival.org

Never Mind Gaza

A Reading with Gazan Poet Yahya Ashour
in conversation with Chase Berggrun

Please join us Thursday September 18th as we celebrate the poetry collection Poppies for Palestine and raise essential funds to support the Grassroots Gaza mutual aid initiative. Gazan poet Yahya Ashour will be reading his work and speaking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Poppies for Palestine, through the lens of history and heartache, gathers together poems that transcend borders and time, standing as a testament to the enduring strength of a people displaced, oppressed, yet never silenced. The poets have donated their works to help the displaced find shelter and solace, making this collection not only a creative endeavor but a powerful act of solidarity.

If you can’t make the event please support our fundraising effort by ordering it here.

Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and an award-winning author. Born on April 22, 1998, he is currently based in California. He is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa and the author of the e-book A Gaza of Siege & Genocide, published by Mizna in 2024. Ashour's portfolio also includes three books for children and young adults in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including Michigan Quarterly Review and Arrowsmith Journal. His poetry manuscript-in-progress received an honorable mention from the Emerging Writer Fellowship. He has read poetry at over 50 U.S. organizations and universities, including Harvard and Stanford. His poetry has been translated into more than 10 languages, including Spanish and Bengali. He was the 2025 author-in-residence at UCLA and currently teaches at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. 

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.

The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates

Andrew Ross, with Ashley Dawson and Jaskiran Dhillion

A Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event

Between the summers of 2023 and 2024, temperatures rose, coastal areas flooded, and droughts and fires raged inland. Unprecedented tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons of astonishing force revealed the disturbances roiling the air and the oceans. More species than ever before disappeared from the planet in what scientists are calling Earth’s Sixth Great Extinction. Reports from the front lines of the climate crisis have always been grim, but this past year was worse than any other, measurably more catastrophic in more ways for more animals and more people. 

In his travels during this tumultuous year, public intellectual and noted scholar Andrew Ross criss-crossed the world, visiting Ramallah (Palestine), Dubai (UAE), Phoenix (USA), and Shanghai (China)—some of the landscapes most disturbed by human activity, whether through active warfare or massive development projects. But rather than offering another eco-polemic or recalling for us the dread prognostications of Malthus in the 19th century or Ehrlich in the 20th, The Weather Report is a clear-eyed and essentially optimistic book that proposes a pragmatic, just, and urgent new common ground reestablishing scalable projects of mutual aid and care as a new, essential center for our economic, ecological, and social well-being. 

Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor at NYU, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Prison Education Program. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of twenty-five books.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, and Extinction: A Radical History.

Jaskiran Dhillon is a first-generation anticolonial scholar and organizer born in Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. She is associate professor of global studies and anthropology at The New School in New York City and author of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention and the coeditor of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement.

The 19th Annual NYC Anarchist Bookfair

Please join us and 98 other tablers at the 19th annual NYC Anarchist Bookfair on September 13th from 11-7pm in La Plaza Cultural community garden on the L.E.S. and check out the other associated activities on the 11-14th. more info

On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
reading group session “One”

After an introduction by author Jack Z. Bratich we are all set to dig into the text. For this section, we encourage everyone to read as much as they can—all the way through if possible—but anyone can attend regardless of how much they’ve read. We will limit discussion to those parts people have been able to read and determine future sessions if the group is interested.

We have copies at the bookstore available on a sliding scale for members of the reading group (thanks to Common Notions) so come and pick yours up.

Drawing on research into ancient male warrior cultures and their reemergence in hypermodern and hypernetworked late capitalism, On Microfascism argues that a “war of restoration” to refound white male sovereignty through eliminationist violence is at the heart of fascism. For our first session, author Jack Bratich will join us as we parse out the commonalities of fascist expressions from school shooters to Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill" and the erasure of trans and bisexual people from the Stonewall Monument website, including the importance of misogyny and the paradoxical tendency of fascists toward self-destruction. This will also set us up to discuss the rest of the book.

Jack Z. Bratich applies social and political theory to such topics as social movements, craft culture, patriarchal subjectivities, and the cultures of secrecy. He is professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and author of On Microfascism: Gender, War, Death (Common Notions, 2022) and Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008). His latest publication is “What Can a Body Do(om)?: Fratriarchy’s Affects and the Capacities to Break Together” (2025) in Capacities to: Affect Up Against Fascism.

John Bohn is a writer and organizer living in Brooklyn. He previously organized the “Anti-fascist, Anti-Imperialist Moby-Dick Reading Group” at The Word is Change.

About the book:

Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.

By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.

The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.

Two Articles from Going Against the Tide journal

Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group

The Dream Defenders present
Joy James in conversation with Steff Reed
on the publication of Confronting Counterinsurgency

Join us for an evening of radical dialogue and political education with Dr. Joy James and Steff Reed, presented by Dream Defenders. On Friday, August 22 at 7pm; we’ll dive into Dr. James’ new edited book, Confronting Counterinsurgency: Cop Cities and Democracy’s Terrors (Pluto Press). Together, we’ll explore how state repression operates—and how communities resist—through history, theory, and movement experience as well as revolutionary love/agape. Come ready to learn, question, and imagine new strategies for liberation!

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.

Steff Reed is a Musician, Educator, and Activist. By sharing his story, Reed shows others that they are not alone. He is a Black Man that loves and gives greatly, modeling that emotional sensitivity and compassion can make us stronger as a community.

Dream Defenders is a Black-led, feminist, socialist, abolitionist, and internationalist political formation fighting for a world without prisons, police, capitalism, and imperialism. We envision communities where safety is built through solidarity, care, and self-determination rather than through punishment and surveillance. Founded in 2012 in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Dream Defenders has grown into a powerful force advocating for liberation, justice, and dignity for Black and marginalized people across the United States and beyond.

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.

Alexandra Egan chapbook launch
with Anna Gurton-Wachter & Mirene Arsanios

Hosted by Anna Moschovakis

Please join us for a night of poetry as Alexandra Egan celebrates the launch of her chapbook Daughter of Filth, Mother of Crumb. Also reading will be the fabulous Mirene Arsanios and Anna Gurton-Wachter in a night hosted by Anna Moschovakis.

Alexandra Egan is a poet, designer, activist, editor, scavenger, an expert in trash, a perpetual party host, and a mother. These are not in order of importance. She lives with her daughter in Bed-Stuy and is currently an Emerge-Surface_Be fellow at The Poetry Project.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentance, Notes on Mother Tounges, and THe Autobiography of a Language. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently the program director at The Poetry Project.

Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer and archivist. She is the author of Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (ugly duckling presse) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently Lucy (belladonna*). Check out www.annagw.com for more.

Anna Moschovakis is a poet and translator whose most recent novel is Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth. Other books include the novels Participation and 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.

On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death
reading group kick off

with Jack Z. Bratich

Drawing on research into ancient male warrior cultures and their reemergence in hypermodern and hypernetworked late capitalism, On Microfascism argues that a “war of restoration” to refound white male sovereignty through eliminationist violence is at the heart of fascism. For our first session, author Jack Bratich will join us as we parse out the commonalities of fascist expressions from school shooters to Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill" and the erasure of trans and bisexual people from the Stonewall Monument website, including the importance of misogyny and the paradoxical tendency of fascists toward self-destruction. This will also set us up to discuss the rest of the book.

For the first session reading the introduction is great (but not necessary). Reach out for information on getting hold of that—and copies of the book are available at the store.

Jack Z. Bratich applies social and political theory to such topics as social movements, craft culture, patriarchal subjectivities, and the cultures of secrecy. He is professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and author of On Microfascism: Gender, War, Death (Common Notions, 2022) and Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008). His latest publication is “What Can a Body Do(om)?: Fratriarchy’s Affects and the Capacities to Break Together” (2025) in Capacities to: Affect Up Against Fascism.

John Bohn is a writer and organizer living in Brooklyn. He previously organized the “Anti-fascist, Anti-Imperialist Moby-Dick Reading Group” at The Word is Change.

About the book:

Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.

By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.

The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.

Out Not Up: Hot Commie Organizing in the Arts

with Josh MacPhee & Andreas Petrossiants
organized by Art Workers’ Inquiry

Join the Art Workers' Inquiry for an event investigating alternative models of revolutionary organizing and movement building among art workers. 

After a series of political inquiries about how the art world relates to Palestine, policing, and the pandemic, it's clear that we need new ways of finding comrades, supporting militant actions, and sharpening our antagonism to capitalism. How do we create a network of revolutionary art workers who are interested in building alliances across the city without cementing ourselves into an institution? How do we build out, not up?

The event will feature the writer Andreas Petrossiants presenting on "expansion vs. scale" in movement building, the artist Josh McPhee discussing the history of artists in the anti-apartheid struggle, and finally, an inquiry on some practical questions for communist organizing in the arts.

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and associate editor of e-flux journal. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space. He plays football for Stop Cop City United.

Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY. MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People's History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade.

The Art Workers’ Inquiry is an organizing group seeking to build power across New York’s vast arts industry. We define art workers as anyone whose labor contributes to the artistic production process, from dancers to artists to art handlers to bartenders at performance venues. We build connections and strengthen bonds of solidarity between art workers with the ultimate goal of building a new, worker-run model of artistic labor.

Unapologetic, Unstaged, Undeniably Queer

Whether you’re a theatre fan, a budding writer, or just love a good story, this is your chance to experience the magic of new plays! This time we’ve got three new writers—Okema T. Moore, Charlene Adhiambo, and Francis Madi Cerrada—bringing you work that crackles with radical honesty, desire, and the kids of truths that only live in the margins.

Every month we celebrate Pride and queer writers, but this one will be particularly special. Bring your people. This one’s for us! 

What to Expect: 

- Live Readings : Talented actors will perform selected scenes from up-and-coming playwrights' works. 

- Audience Feedback : Be part of the creative process! Share your thoughts in a short, interactive feedback session after each reading. 

- Networking : Connect with writers, actors, and fellow theatre enthusiasts over drinks and snacks. 

LINE UP: Okema T. Moore, Charlene Adhiambo, Francis Madi Cerrada 

PRODUCED BY: Naomi Bah

Date : June 26th 

Time : 7pm 

Location : The Word is Change (368 Tompkins Ave) 

Tickets : FREE (Suggested Donation $10)

Larissa Pham and Ruben Reyes Jr. join Santiago Jose Sanchez on Tuesday (yes Tuesday) to celebrate a year of Hombrecito

Please join us for Volume Fifteen of Hoes for Prose as we celebrate the paperback release of Santiago Jose Sanchez’s debut novel Hombrecito, a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant's complex relationships with his mother and his motherland.

Tonight we’ve got a stacked line-up of readings and discussions featuring authors and friends. We’ve got Larissa Pham and Ruben Reyes Jr. joining Santiago and then all of us for a night fun.

He moves to New York, ducking in and out of bed with different men as he seeks out something, someone, to make him whole again. When his mother invites him to visit family in Colombia with her, he returns to the country as a young man, trying to find peace with his father, with his homeland, with who he’s become since he left, and with who his mother is: finally we come to know her and her secrets, her complex ambivalence and fierce love.

Hombrecito—“little man”—is a moving portrait of a young person between cultures, between different ideas of himself. From an extraordinary new talent, this is a story told with startling beauty and intensity, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.

Santiago Jose Sanchez (they/them) is a queer Colombian American writer and artist born in Ibagué, Colombia. Their stories have been featured in McSweeney’s Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, and Joyland. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale University, Sanchez teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa, Miami, and New York City. Hombrecito is their debut novel.

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. She has written essays and criticism for the Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, Guernica, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is also the author of Fantasian, a novella.

Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and the author of the forthcoming Archive of Unknown Universes and the short story collection There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard College, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Please join us Wednesday June 18th at 7pm for the launch of Freedom Zines.

During this interactive panel, attendees will be presented with a brief history of the Sea Island Citizenship schools and the Mississippi Freedom Summer schools, as well as a description of the Freedom Zines workshop. Attendees will also be asked to think about and discuss their early writing experiences by the panel moderator. Then, Freedom Zines participants will discuss and share their zine-making process, followed by a Q&A. Zines will also be distributed to all event attendees.

About:

Freedom Zines is a public writing project that asks participants to investigate their relationships with writing and, by extension, explore their social and political identities. This project explores how the writing workshop can function as a communal, mobile literacy site—and how it embodies the historically ambulatory nature of Black literacies in the mid-20th century American South. It also frames the writing workshop as a byproduct of historically significant mobile writing spaces. In the face of ChatGPT and other services that purport to write for us, this project proposes that now, more than ever, we should center the act of writing as a way to engage our social and political identities. The histories of Black literacy movements in the U.S. South serve as a guidepost for this project because they remind us that writing can be a responsive, community-oriented action.

Learn more about the project here

Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume VIII)

Margaret Rhee (Love, Robot)
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (Mutual Interest)
Heather María Ács
Kavi Bose
Bec Ritchie
Ava Robinson
Caroline Shifke

Come on out for Volume Eight 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.

With your hosts Kate McDonough and Grazi Ruzzante

Cops Out of the Art World zine launch
with the Art Workers’ Inquiry

The Hollow Half:
A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

Sarah Aziza in conversation with Andrew Riad

with poetry from
Lara Atallah & Chase Berggrun

A part of the New York Arab Festival

This event is happening on a Tuesday

In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.

Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

Andrew Riad is a Coptic Nubian Egyptian artist and poet exploring the intersection of poetry, research, and play. He works with textiles, text, filmography, photography, found objects, and culinary practices to undo a monolithic history and propose a [re]imagined and [re][un]written history, revealing silenced narratives. His projects are research-based and driven, but they also mythologize life in an attempt to configure an opportunity for play and imagination. For him, language is the experience of sound and ritual; of symbol and gesture, and as such, is a site for resurrection and imagination. Riad is a graduate of New York University Abu Dhabi (May 2022) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and Creative Writing and Legal Studies and is a current MFA (Writing) student at Pratt Institute (May 2025). He is an alumnus of the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) and of SAMT Alternative School. His work has been shown and published regionally and internationally, including Mizna Arab Art Journal, Makhzin, The Poetry Project, 421 Arts Campus, and elsewhere. IG: @frequentlytranslating

Praise for The Hollow Half

“In breathtaking prose, Palestinian American journalist Sarah Aziza confronts the looming specter of death in various forms. She writes movingly about recovering from an eating disorder that nearly killed her and delves into her family’s history and what it means to be the descendant of refugees from Gaza.” —Hannah Bae, San Francisco Chronicle

"Aziza took what a memoir can do and turned it on its head. She plays with style and genre, but also introduces the characters in her past and present with such originality. One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

“The Hollow Half is not simply a memoir; it is a meditation on rupture, a lyrical mapping of grief, longing, and the liminal spaces in-between. Told across the fault lines of language and geography, it traverses multiple selves and sites—Palestinian and American, daughter and witness, exile and return—without collapsing them into false unity. Instead, Aziza offers a form that honors fragmentation as its own kind of truth.” —Abdelrahman ElGendy, The Baffler

"Excruciating, to live in a nation, a culture, a moment in which one must continuously insist upon their own humanity and the humanity of those they love. And yet, so many of history’s greatest writers—from Darwish to Morrison—have taken up this project, fractalling shards of unprecedented experience into something as vital, precious, undeniable, as life itself. Sarah Aziza sings herself into that chorus with clarity and tenderness, writing, 'Palestine: an orientation toward a life that names, and holds open, the ruptures loving makes.' The Hollow Half is inventive, propulsive testimony, a lush love letter to a place, a people, and the resilience of memory." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

"How do we come to this life? Is it automatic, by birth? Or must we also choose it? Sarah Aziza's astonishing memoir is a record of a mystery of the self, a woman in the grip of a despair that has too many names or none at all, hiding as it seeks to erase her. To survive she must move towards being, as she says, 'ambushed by hope.' We travel with her into that place where even language abandoned her, and her effort to return, yes, alive, maybe even more than that, has lessons for us all. A blazing, hard-won triumph." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"In the breathtaking, fiercely honest The Hollow Half, Sarah Aziza weaves a genre-bending memoir of body and land, an unflinching look at the tyranny of emotional, physical, and intrapsychic hunger. These hungerings—complex, visceral, ever-present—frame a story of hauntings, erasures, colonization, and the metaphor and reality of Palestine. But The Hollow Half is not merely a dissection of absence; it is an expansion of genre itself, gorgeously blending memoir with dreamwork, ancestral secrets with reclaimed history. Through stunning, transformative prose, Aziza writes both herself—and the reader—towards liberation." —Hala Alyan, author of The Moon That Turns You Back

“Sarah Aziza’s writing penetrates the heart and the pulse in such a way that you are breathing with her, rapturous against the fate of a body that cannot fully contain you, nor can it be contained. The Hollow Half is a potent and confronting memoir about the perils of our explicable ghosts—whether that be ancestral lineages or the unsatiated dreams of our ancestors or the yearning of something that can be never tasted or quenched—this book shakes you into understanding the devastation of what it means to be alive in a time like this.” —Fariha Róisín, author of Who Is Wellness For and Survival Takes A Wild Imagination

"If warring nations were to fall away what would be left but bodies? Sarah Aziza's The Hollow Half brings a Palestinian song and body back to life from the ruins. To sing this blood song she must cross all boundaries, between people, places, histories, and languages. Here is a heart beating, not beaten. The question is, how will we hold such a sacred text?" —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

"The Hollow Half is a shimmering testament to disciplined love's exigencies and transcendent possibilities. It is a book that all who seek a path beyond the brutal systems and narratives of colonial modernity will return to time and again." —Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

“The Hollow Half catapults every single expectation we have ever had of the memoir genre, and the settled memory. Is it a memoir? It's at least that. But Aziza both longs for and accepts radical tradition and the aches of innovation. The book is body and spirit, full and famished. I'm not sure I've read a book more unafraid of finding free.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

About the New York Arab Festival

New York Arab Festival (NYAF) is a multidisciplinary festival spanning all genres of art, culture, design, cuisine, philosophy, and intersecting industries. It programs arts and culture from the Arabic-speaking region and the Arab diaspora and showcases Arab American artists. NYAF was established in 2022 to commemorate Arab American Heritage Month and fight the erasure of Arab and Arab American identities from NYC, a place Arabs have called home for over three centuries. NYAF is organized and run by its founding members: Artistic Director and Curator Adham Hafez, Urbanist and Curator Adam Kucharski, and founding Senior Producer Cindy Sibilsky. NYAF is produced by HaRaKa Platform and powered by Wizara LLC in partnership with many celebrated institutions in NYC and worldwide. www.newyorkarabfestival.com @newyorkarabfestivalofficial

Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods

Jennifer Kabat in conversation with Elvia Wilk
Brooklyn Book Launch

“Jennifer Kabat’s Nightshining sifts a riveting exposé of the Cold War technocratic fantasy-state through lyrical family memoir. Her superb investigation calls to mind those of Rebecca Solnit and Errol Morris, among others.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

“Nightshining is a book of belonging, belief, care, and legacy. Jennifer Kabat writes powerfully against narratives of progress, without abandoning wonder, passion, or possibility. By unpacking her own history, she asks what inheritance means on both big and small scales, prompting us to question long-held belief systems. In this catastrophic time, what must we continue to hold dear, of ourselves and the planet? What must we learn to do without, rupture, destroy? This book is intimate yet vast—meticulous and monumental.”—Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape

“In this prismatic book, Jennifer Kabat threads together floods, the Catskills, her father, rainmakers, the Cold War, climate change, the Mohawk Nation, small towns, and Kurt Vonnegut, among other subjects, into a complex emotional pattern that makes the past live—because it has never gone away.”—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name

“Nightshining rockets from deepest time to last Thursday, from Doomsday weapons to the endless mystery of one’s parents, socialist dreams and capitalist nightmares, the Cold War then to daily life now in our seriously unhinged country. Like Kurt Vonnegut, whom she invokes and whose brother looms large in Nightshining, the book bounds through impossible dilemmas, fueled by shimmering upper atmosphere ice crystals. Kabat has next-level powers of discernment and shimmering prose. She writes with a calm fury, precise and generous and exacting. Her neatest trick is convincing us—despite all evidence—that all is not lost and that there’s reason for hope. I want to believe.”—Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong

"Kabat examines grief, government secrets, and meteorological manipulation in this elegant and layered account."—Publishers Weekly

“Nightshining is a provocative memoir that considers how a community’s waterways reflect its history and portend future impacts of climate change.”—Foreword Reviews 

Jennifer Kabat was a finalist for the Notting Hill Editions’ essay prize and has been published in BOMB and The Best American Essays. The author of The Eighth Moon, her writing has also appeared in Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. She’s received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism and teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the New School. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.

Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York. She is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022). A new novel, A Diagnosis, is coming in 2026. Her work has appeared in publications like Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, Granta, The Atlantic, n+1, The White Review, BOMB, Mousse, Flash Art, and Art Agenda. She is currently a contributing editor at e-flux Journal. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute.

Born In Flames: A Community Political Screening
with For Our Liberation

Join us this Mother’s Day for a screening of Born in Flames (1983). Born in Flames tells the story of an America in which a “social-democratic” revolution “succeeds”, and the following nation has yet to resolve the “Woman Question”. Allowing the patriarchy to maintain its grasp on society, and maintain its oppression of the women masses. The film follows a host of comrades and contradictions rapidly sharpen, and a Women’s Liberation Army is theorized.

VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED:
This film contains themes of sexual violence, misogyny and nudity.

Doors open at 7pm and The film starts at 7:15pm, with a brief discussion following the film’s end.

Free entry for all Mothers/Maternal figures and all Black and Brown Women and femmes suggested $5-10 donation for all others.

No one will be turned away for lack of donation.

Masks are required and provided along with Covid tests.

All events at 7pm

Thursday, May 8th

Black Study and Catastrophe
Bedour Alagraa and Joshua Myers

A conversation with Bedour Alagraa and Joshua Myers that considers the role of study and thought amid the current crisis. Drawing from Myers’s Of Black Study and Alagraa’s forthcoming The Interminable Catastrophe the conversation explores the ways that Blackness can more than respond to antagonism but reshape how we understand the terms.

Sunday, May 11th

Born In Flames: A Community Political Screening
hosted by For Our Liberation

Join us this Mother’s Day for a screening. Born in Flames tells the story of an America in which a “social-democratic” revolution “succeeds”, and the following nation has yet to resolve the “Woman Question”. Allowing the patriarchy to maintain its grasp on society, and maintain its oppression of the women masses. The film follows a host of comrades and contradictions rapidly sharpen, and a Women’s Liberation Army is theorized.

Wednesday, May 14th

Jennifer Kabat’s “Nightshining is a book of belonging, belief, care, and legacy. Jennifer Kabat writes powerfully against narratives of progress, without abandoning wonder, passion, or possibility. By unpacking her own history, she asks what inheritance means on both big and small scales, prompting us to question long-held belief systems. In this catastrophic time, what must we continue to hold dear, of ourselves and the planet? What must we learn to do without, rupture, destroy? This book is intimate yet vast—meticulous and monumental.”—Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape

Tuesday, May 27th
Sarah Aziza The Hollow Half

“Excruciating, to live in a nation, a culture, a moment in which one must continuously insist upon their own humanity and the humanity of those they love. And yet, so many of history’s greatest writers—from Darwish to Morrison—have taken up this project, fractalling shards of unprecedented experience into something as vital, precious, undeniable, as life itself. Sarah Aziza sings herself into that chorus with clarity and tenderness, writing, ‘Palestine: an orientation toward a life that names, and holds open, the ruptures loving makes.’ The Hollow Half is inventive, propulsive testimony, a lush love letter to a place, a people, and the resilience of memory.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

Thursday, May 29th
Cops Out of the Art World zine launch

Join the Art Workers’ Inquiry to celebrate the launch of their new zine Cops Out of the Art World. This publication gathers research on the links between arts institutions and policing by art workers committed to abolition. The launch will include readings from contributors, followed by the opportunity to join in an inquiry investigating strategies to organize against deportation.

Black Study and Catastrophe

a conversation with Bedour Alagraa and Joshua Myers

Please join us for a conversation with Bedour Alagraa and Joshua Myers that considers the role of study and thought amid the current crisis. Drawing from Myers’s Of Black Study and Alagraa’s forthcoming The Interminable Catastrophe the conversation explores the ways that Blackness can more than respond to antagonism but reshape how we understand the terms.

A memorial reading to remember and honor the poet and revolutionary Joshua Clover’s astonishing life and work. Bring your favorite of his lines to read. 7-9 pm

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group

Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.er it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

Orisanmi Burton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University.