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.

Every month is a month to celebrate poetry, but when it’s “National Poetry Month” you really got to celebrate it and to help us do that we’ve got three powerful poets—Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Megan Pinto, and Jordan Windholz—to share their work.

Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, TX to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Boston Review, The Journal, Frontier Poetry, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Cowboy Park, was selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson as the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and is published by The University of Wisconsin Press.

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection, just out from Four Way Books. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.Org, Ploughshares, and in The Slowdown podcast. Megan lives in Brooklyn. 

Jordan Windholz is the author of The Sisters (Black Ocean, 2024) and Other Psalms (University of North Texas Press, 2015), winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. His poems have been published in Boston Review, Seneca Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and the tiny journal, among a number of other places. He lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume VII)

Charlee Dyroff
Mel King
Kate Tooley
Anjali Krishnakumar
Max “OAK” Masure }
Eric Weck

Save the date for Volume Seven 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

The books are back!!! And we are looking at Wednesday April 9th at 7pm so update your calendars

The first printing sold out immediately and the event will be scheduled for when books are once again available. Stay tuned!

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Kellie Jones to celebrate the publication of her eagerly awaited book on David Hammons.

A star of the West Coast Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and the winner of a Prix de Rome prize as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, David Hammons rose to fame in Los Angeles with his body prints, in which he used his entire body as a printing plate. His later work engaged with materials that he found in urban environments—from greasy brown paper bags, discarded hair from barber shops, and empty bottles of cheap wine—which he turned into things of wonder while also commenting on a country’s neglect of its citizens. In this volume, a new generation of scholars, Tobias Wofford, Abbe Schriber, and Sampada Aranke, broaden the theoretical mapping of Hammons’s career and its impact, challenging viewers to imagine, in the words of Aranke, “how to see like Hammons.”

Please join Ytasha Womack for the Brooklyn Launch of her new book The Afrofuturist Evolution: Creative Paths to Self-Discovery Sunday April 6th at 7pm.

From Senegalese poet, political theorist, and politician Leopold Sedar Senghor’s ideas on the plastic arts and Negritude to writer Malidoma Patrese Some’s articulation of water symbolism in Burkina Faso; from tap dance exercises to composer, DJ, and recording artist King Britt’s Blacktronica, The Afrofuturist Evolution aims to demonstrate Afrofuturism as embodied theory in practice. This book—in simple, straightforward, but powerful ways—invites readers to bring these practices into their own lives.

What people are saying about The Afrofuturist Evolution and why you want to be there:

“Ytasha Womack shows us that our relationship with space, time, and the idea of the multiverse isn’t just about equations—it’s also about imagination, artistic creation, and our spiritual sensibilities. We are lucky to have a griot, a storyteller, like Ytasha Womack as our guide into the Afrofuturist cosmos.” —CHANDA PRESCOD-WEINSTEIN, theoretical physicist and author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“The Afrofuturist Evolution is an incredibly fantastic body of work that charges not just through Afrofuturism but into Afropantheology, cosmology, and other schools of thought. . . . A must-read for anyone looking to understand Black scapes, cultures, knowledge, living, and being.” —OGHENECHOVWE DONALD EKPEKI, Nebula-winning speculative fiction writer/editor and founder of Afropantheology

“A rebellious and instantly enjoyable trip, a reverberating ode to remembering, and an aphrodisiac of conjuring dream worlds. Ytasha takes us on a red pill, blue pill rabbit hole exploration and understanding of the Afro-ness in futurism. Afrofuturefunkadelicexpialidocious!” —NONA HENDRYX, musician, producer, author, and activist

THE AFROFUTURIST EVOLUTION PLAYLIST

Be immersed in the sonics of the celestial and earthly as we prepare for the book’s landing. Playlist here.

We are excited to welcome Boff Whalley, musician, author, and a founding member of the anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba and Commoners Choir, for a night of song and stories to celebrate the publication of But: Life Isn't Like That, Is It?

“These are stories about real lives and real people—stuttering, wayward, disjointed, funny, ridiculous, and unplanned.”

To coincide with the release of But, Boff is touring both the UK and USA, visiting bookstores and venues to talk about, and sing, the stories that make up the book. Part reading, part gig and part conversation, Boff will play songs from a lifetime of writing and making music, songs which chime with the book, and will draw from a personal history of creative activism.

Boff explains his new book, “It's a book about stories, and a book of stories. How the stories we see and hear as films, novels and theatre aren't really the stories we experience in the real world. It's a big dig into storytelling and is mainly about the disruptions that stop our lives being simple narratives. 

“This book is threaded through with a travelogue mapped between my meetings with a variety of people—I've called them DISRUPTERS—who disrupted my own life in the best possible ways.

“The book is a collaboration with designer/typesetter Christian Brett, who has worked recently with Penny Rimbaud, Sleaford Mods and Killing Joke. But possibly more relevant is the fact that I sit next to him for every Burnley FC home match. He's a sweary curmudgeon and his design and typesetting for the book is incredible.”

Please join Hagen Blix for a presentation, celebration, and discussion of their new book, Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares, which will surely keep us up at night. Hagen will be in conversation with David Widder.

Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fears about AI reflect different economic realities—from venture capitalists, to engineers, to artists, to warehouse workers. Truly understanding the potential impacts of AI means confronting capitalism and class, power and exploitation, in concrete terms. Only then can we fight the real threats to our lives, livelihoods, and the planet, instead of tilting at nightmare windmills.

Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of capitalism and its violent ways of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of insecure gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalists may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one in which our labor, knowledge, and technologies serve the people rather than capital.

Hagen Blix (he/they) is a New York City-based cognitive scientist whose research spans language, artificial intelligence, and political economy.

David Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating “Artificial Intelligence” systems think about the downstream harms their systems make possible, and the wider cultural, political, and economic logics which shape these thoughts. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and earned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously conducted research at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His recent research has been accepted to FAccT, Nature, CSCW, and Big Data & Society. His scholarly and activist work has appeared in Motherboard, Wired, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore. He maintains a conceptual-realist artistic practice, advocates against police terror and pervasive surveillance, and enjoys distance running. You can engage with him on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions, 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago, 2019). He is an artist in residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn. His poems appeared in Poetry, SAND, APR, MQR, Icarus among others. Some of his honors include: a fellowship and residency at Millay Arts, the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize and the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship.   

Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus in 1979 and moved to Sweden in 2008. Almadhoun has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic and his poetry has been translated into nearly 30 languages. He has created several poetry films, collaborated extensively with artists and scholars, and curated numerous events, readings, and literary anthologies. Adrenalin, translated by Catherine Cobham, came out with Action Books in 2017, and in February 2025, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand will be published simultaneously in English translation by Action Books in the U.S. and Divided Publishing in London and Brussels. Almadhoun currently divides his time between Berlin and Stockholm.

A working-class radical revolutionary's tale—penned by a prominent union leader—now available in English.

Paul Buhle says: "Your Comrade, Avreml Broide is one of the most remarkable texts in all of American labor fiction."

Raffi Magarik observes: "At a moment when many American Jews are grappling with our community’s story of racial assimilation and class ascent, Kaufman has made available, in Gold’s novel, a welcome, if bracing, alternative: an unabashedly leftist story of the Jew who remains proudly, defiantly, a worker."

About the book: Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline.

With bold and stimulating illustrations by William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman's translation brings Gold's emotionally rich narrative forward to reveal some of the most dramatic conflicts in America's suppressed Communist history. This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broideoffers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists.

Annie Sommer Kaufman is a Chicago organizer who builds antizionist Jewish community by teaching Yiddish and Talmud, and as a member-leader of Jewish Voice for Peace. She worked for a decade in the fashion industry as a pattern maker. As a founding member of Red Emma's bookstore in Baltimore, she was active in the Industrial Workers of the World.

Rosza Daniel Lanf/Levitskiy
cultural worker and organizer. never learned how to make art for art’s sake; rarely likes working alone. can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them – outfits, collectives, performances, barricades, essays, meals… raised by red diaper radicals, active since the 90s in jewish left projects and the yiddish cultural revitalization svive. just another diasporist gendertreyf veltlekhe mischling fem who identifies with, not as.

Join us for the last discussion this season of the Gathering Utopias series on Saturday March 1st at 7pm. We will be discussing the afterword to the new edition of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams “When History Wakes,” the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Program, and the Young Lord’s 13-Point Program.

Gathering Utopias is back! In the fall we hosted a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary that focused on speculative fiction. This spring the focus is on historical utopias! Feel free to attend one or all!

This reading group is happening in conjunction with Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. The concert that accompanies these readings will take place on March 9th 🎩🎀💜⭐️

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution

Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group

Gathering Utopias is back! In the fall we hosted a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary that focused on speculative fiction. This spring the focus is on historical utopias! Join us on Saturday February 22 and March 1. For this session we’ll be discussing Kristin’s Ross’s The Emergence of Social Space, pages 4—25 and the Manifesto of the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists. The reading for March 1 will be announced soon.  Feel free to attend one or all!

This reading group is happening in conjunction with Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. The concert that accompanies these readings will take place on March 9th 🎩🎀💜⭐️

Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume VI)

Save the date for Volume Six!! You won’t want to miss out on a night of joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe!

with Andy Jiaming Tang (Cinema Love), Alejandro Heredia (Loca), Aida Bardissi, Caroline Giovanie, Vanessa Dos Santos, Michelle Woods, and Alex Rapine

and your hosts

Kate McDonough is a queer non binary trans writer, organizer and performance artist. Their work explores the politics of place v. space and finding radical queer joy in the midst of an apocalypse. Originally from the Bronx, Kate lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from The New School

Kelby Clark is a poet and fiction writer, based in Brooklyn, NY but born and bred across the Hudson in New Jersey. Currently, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. Her work explores topics of race and Black identity, as well as topics like the myth of suburban bliss. She also enjoys writing about and reading to her cat, Mowgli.

Lampback Lit Reading Series

Join us on the third Sunday of the month for the Lampblack Lit Reading Series featuring readings from early-career and established poets, translators, and prose writers from the Black diaspora.

Gathering Utopias is back! In the fall we hosted a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary that focused on speculative fiction. This spring the focus is on historical utopias! Join us on Saturday, February 15th at 7:00 to discuss excerpts from David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. PDF on instagram @artworkersinquiry ✨ or in the store. Subsequent meetings will be on Saturday February 22 and March 1, with readings TBA.  Feel free to attend one or all!

This reading group is happening in conjunction with Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. The concert that accompanies these readings will take place on March 9th 🎩🎀💜⭐️

Love Letters: Video and Poetry Reading

Love Letters Vol.6: Hosted by Mon Mohapatra and Roshan Abraham, Love Letters is an annual reading of letters—personal letters, fictional letters, archival letters—by poets, writers and artists, timed to coincide with Valentine's Day. This year we are excited to hear from Shaira Chair, Tel Mancini, Madison Jamar, Aristide Kirby, Akshwarya Agora, Danialie Fertile, and Fablina Yeaqub. After the performance, we'll sit down together to write letters of solidarity and support to incarcerated people. This year will also be a fundraiser for Palestinian families.

Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir
by Seth Lorinczi

Advance Praise for Death Trip

“Death Trip has the potential to open big conversations about ancestral histories—what we carry, as a family or an identified ‘people’—along with all the things we don’t know. In this moment of what Joanna Macy called ‘The Great Turning,’ the courage to view stories with nuance and compassion, to take them in and let them go, is essential to our survival. We're going to have to repair history if we want a future.”
—Vanessa Veselka, Zazen, The Great Offshore Grounds

“In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and passionately lived memoir of intergenerational trauma, Lorinczi leads the reader on a double journey: Into the harrowing bloodlands of 20th-century fascism and, almost as scary, the miasmic inner life of 21st-century, post-punk manhood. This is a good trip in the most profound sense.”
—Jon Raymond, Denial, Freebird

“Seth Lorinczi’s journey through MDMA therapy takes him into a labyrinth of family secrets and ancestral trauma. The story of what he finds there—and how it changes him—is as gripping and propulsive as a crime novel. I was captivated the whole way through.”
—Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

pleasureis amircale booklaunch

Bianca Rae Meesinger // Nora Collen Fulton // Shiv Kotecha // Mohammed Zenia

pleasureis amiracle

A book of poems written out of a depressive episode, in which a devotional approach to music and desire reestablishes communication between the poet’s body and the world.

In pleasureis amiracle, the poems invoke the lyric and refuse it, moving between time and sound—words re-connect and re-cohere, resisting separation and challenging readers to feel their way to meaning. Perception becomes a many-limbed entanglement from which the reader is never let go. Music is both divine and accessible, a sublimation of everyday movements into an erotics of sensation. An experiment in form as much as content, it asks what can be cured by music, what is trans about desire, and how can one allow the body to feel what the mind sees, or vice versa.

PRAISE

“The way Messinger produces and overcomes space, I want to weep. ‘It’s all right if you don’t return my love’—what an image of grace. In the red interplay of anticipation and knowledge, she shows us bodies as bits of psychic pressure, active, luminous, without guarantees. How green is the valley of syntax, of poems that don’t feel without thinking. ‘she’s gone isn’t it, I will wake up there wont i—.’ Look at what language can do, always more than what we can say, when it sees the struggle inside itself.”
—Benjamin Krusling

“Feel the title in your mouth: a linguistically foreign substance from which something ravishing and graceful emerges. In the lush textures of this luminous new work, Bianca Rae Messinger brings the reader to thresholds of perception precisely where existential and relational vectors collide. The energies generated by the poems’ formal innovations—margins, boxes, bars, syntactical boundaries, verbal mergings, moving screens of simultaneous action—spark the air of each page. Feel the inexorable motion of the world as it slips in and out of reach. This work’s pleasures make a practice of transformation.”
—Elizabeth Willis

Bianca Rae Messinger is a poet and translator living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks “The Love of God” (Inpatient Press, 2016) and “parallel bars” (Center for Book Arts, 2021) and translator of “In the Jungle There is Much to DO” [comunidad del sur [mauricio gatti], Berlin Biennale, 2020] among others.

Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate focused on philosophy, trans theory and poetics. She is the authour of Thee Display (Anteism), Presence Detection System (Hiding Press) and Life Experience Coolant, (Book*hug). Nora's poems have been published in Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work can be found in Radical Philosophy, The Poetry Project, Music and Literature and more.

Shiv Kotecha is a writer and editor living in New York. He is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018), and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). His criticism appears in publications including 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, frieze, The Nation, MUBI’s Notebook, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. For the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, he co-edits Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of experimental arts writing. He is Co-Chair of the Writing Discipline for Bard MFA—Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Mohammed Zenia is a poet based in Brooklyn. Tel Aviv (Porosity Press) is their first book.

Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together

Dean Spade, in conversation with Morgan Bassichis 

Around the globe, people are faced with spiraling crises, from the pandemic and climate change-induced disasters to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, genocide, racist policing, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. More and more of us feel mobilized to fight back, often dedicating our lives to  collective liberation. But even those of us who long for change seem to have trouble when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Too often we think of our political values as outward-facing positions again dominant systems of power.  Many projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age. How do we divest from cultural programming that gives us harmful expectations about sex, dating, romance and friendship?

How do we recover from the messed up dynamics we were trained in by childhood caregivers? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom into step with our desires for healing and connection? Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, so we can stick together while we work for survival and liberation.

All the reserved seats have been claimed, but people don’t always show up and we will try to accommodate everyone, but can’t guarantee space. (If weather permits we will have an outdoor option) And please remember that N95, KN95, KF94, or equivalent masks are required for this event. Bring one if you have one, they will also be available here. If you are feeling sick please stay home and rest up!

Advance Praise for Love in a F*cked Up World:

“Dean Spade has written a pragmatic, timely book to help us navigate our most intimate relationships with a collective mindset; release romance myths and approach love as a practice; and cultivate discernment and freedom where we are trained towards judgement and ownership. He teaches us with gentle, relatable clarity and questions that allow us to reflect on how we are loving each other in this fucked up gorgeous world, and how to hold on to each other as the changes come.” - adrienne maree brown, author of Loving Corrections, Pleasure Activism, and Emergent Strategy

“Everyday we have the chance to be the change we want to see in the world in how we treat each other. And yet, it is often in our intimate relationships that we fail to live our values - in often very painful ways. In Love In A F*cked-Up World, Dean Spade helps us love better, care better, build better, and even break up better so that we can come together (and apart) in ways that keep our communities and movements intact.”  --Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want To Talk About Race, Mediocre, and Be A Revolution

We Keep Each Other Safe: N95, KN95, KF94, or equivalent masks are required for this event. Please bring one if you have one, they will also be available here. If you are feeling sick please stay home and rest up! We are on the ground floor with no stairs. The bathroom may be a challenge for wheelchairs (alternative is across the street), please call us with any access questions and accomodations we can make.

Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume V)

Joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe!

Volume FIVE!!

Gina Chung
Tonee Mae Moll
Javeria Hasnain
Aditi Bhattacharjee
Max Fischer
Kindall Grant

Hosts

Kate McDonough is a queer non binary trans writer, organizer and performance artist. Their work explores the politics of place v. space and finding radical queer joy in the midst of an apocalypse. Originally from the Bronx, Kate lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from The New School

Kelby Clark is a poet and fiction writer, based in Brooklyn, NY but born and bred across the Hudson in New Jersey. Currently, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. Her work explores topics of race and Black identity, as well as topics like the myth of suburban bliss. She also enjoys writing about and reading to her cat, Mowgli.