The Long War on Iran with Behrooz Ghamari
The Long War on Iran
with Behrooz Ghamari
In this moment of crisis we are thrilled to welcome Behrooz Ghamari, Iranian historian and scholar who spent three years on death row in the Evin Prison in Iran on Wednesday March 18th at 7pm.
In his new book, The Long War on Iran (O/R) Ghamari draws on two decades of political analysis to explore the history of US intervention in the region, focusing on the enduring sanctions imposed on Iran and the persistent perception of the Islamic Republic as a major obstacle to American power. Despite the repressive policies of the state, Iran has remained a vibrant society with active intellectual, cultural, and social justice movements. The book examines these internal changes and shifts in Iranian politics.
By challenging the conventional image of Iran as a totalitarian regime, Ghamari urges readers to appreciate the country’s diverse society and complex political landscape. He calls for a re-evaluation of how the US engages with Iran, advocating for a more informed, nuanced approach to Middle East diplomacy. At a critical moment when US policy is being reshaped, The Long War on Iran is a timely reminder that, if the US fails to acknowledge Iran’s transformations, both nations will continue to face new events―and the same old questions.
Check out his recent apperance on Democracy Now!
Behrooz Ghamari is affiliated with the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto. He was Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University from 2020 to 2024.
He is the author of three books on different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath: Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Iran; Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment; and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution.
“Brimming with insight, this book expertly demystifies Iran.”
—Vali Nasr
“Ghamari parts the dark veil surrounding Iran, allowing us to finally see through the fog of mystification and misdirection that has warped our perception of one of the world’s most dangerously misunderstood societies.”
—Jeffrey St. Clair
“The book weaves personal memory with political analysis, arguing that Iran is better understood as a fractured society shaped by trauma, fear and competing hopes rather than ideological fanaticism alone.”
—The Sri Lankan Guardian
“Behrooz Ghamari was a death row prisoner in 1984, during the Iran-Iraq War, nearly dying of Lymphoma. He survived to tell the story. It is also the story . . . of a country misused and abused, from within and outside.”
—Le Monde Diplomatique
“Blending personal experience with sharp analysis, the book invites readers to rethink entrenched narratives and view Iran through a more nuanced political lens.”
—The Daily Star
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
It’s 2026, can we find some JOY in the Soft Apocalypse?
If you’ve been to a previous session you know we can & if you haven’t come find some! Featuring Jaquira Díaz, KIm Narby, Rob Weston, Rocky Halpern, and Anjali Krishnakumar
Hosted by Kate McDonough and Grazi Ruzzante
Some upcoming events
As we get the full descriptions of these events together and up on the website here are some dates to save.
4/1 Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want with Danielle Chynoweth & Elizabeth Adams
4/12 Poetry with: Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry—A genre-defying blend of poetry, performance, and political awakening that confronts the transnational crisis of sex-selective elimination and Dawn Lundy Martin
4/18-25 The Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl is back! Bigger and better than ever before.
4/19 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha release party for The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
4/24 Book release party for Imogen Smith’s new collection raw & zero! A book of transition—poetic, political, religious—and its always radical implications.
4/29 On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland with Alex Werth and Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers
5/7 How To Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza with Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi
Upcoming Events (& past events)
If you’re seeing this we have some exciting events in the works, but aren’t ready to share all the details.
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Keep scrolling to see what you missed or remind yourself of who spoke at an event you went to.
Backstitch with Marian Mitchell Donahue
Backstitch Book Launch
Marian Mitchell Donahue in conversation with Anjali Duva
"Backstitch is a splendid, irreducible work of art—about making art, about time, about memory, about the stars in the heavens, and maybe most of all about family." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers
Two sisters, Violet and Marigold, reunite at a retrospective of their troubled mother's art. Together they must confront the consequences of her ambition and the difficult, private reality of the family's public narrative. Moving through the gallery's rooms and through time to arrive at the truth of her life and death, the daughters unravel their family ties, the gift and cost of artistic talent, and the legacy that they must carry.
Please join us as we help Marian Mitchell Donahue celebrate the publication oh her first novel. Marian, who lives and teaches in Brooklyn will be joined in conversation by Anjali Duva, a co-founder of Galiot Press.
More Praise for Backstitch
“In Backstitch, Marian Mitchell Donahue unspools the haunting story of a visionary artist whose brilliance is matched only by her volatility-and the two daughters caught in her gravitational pull. Moving fluidly through time, the novel exposes the blurred lines between creation and destruction, love and madness. A gripping, compulsive read.” —B.A. Shapiro, NYT best selling author of The Lost Masterpiece and The Art Forger.
“Backstitch is a wonderfully intelligent and enthralling novel about the costs of making art, both for the artist, and for her daughters. Donahue has a remarkable gift for describing art and it is as if we too are walking through the exhibition, appreciating each of Alice's vivid fibre art pieces, even as we learn about the tangled history and emotions that led to this triumphant moment. I reached the last page with profound pleasure and deep admiration.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Road From Belhaven
“Grounded in the slippery pursuit of truth, Marian Mitchell Donahue's Backstitch wrestles with the very idea of making and memory, examining both the price of art and all its riches.” —Christine Coulson, bestselling author of One Woman Show
“Marian Donahue's Backstitch is more than a remarkable or noteworthy debut novel. It is a feast of exquisite language that brilliantly depicts the complicated mess common to all families and all artists. This epic tale of the Snyders is the perfect marriage of form and masterful storytelling and it will stay with you long after you finish the last page.” —Robert Lopez, author of The Best People
Singing for Our Lives
Singing for Our Lives:
A Zine Launch and International Women’s Day Celebration
Please join Annabelle Heckler and Laleña Garcia for a Story Hour, Sunday March 8th at 2pm, to celebrate the publication of Sing For Our Lives and International Women’s Day.
Young people and grown ups, bring each other to read a new zine and sing together because there’s power in a union.
Visioning New Worlds
RESCHEDULED to March Fourth
Visioning New Worlds:
A Radical Imagination Workshop
hosted by zulaikha
Now more than ever we need to harness the power of our collective radical imagination. We live in the imagination of the oppressor. We deserve to live in the imagination of the free. Through creative practices, connecting back with the earth, and connecting with each other, we will be calling forth the worlds we so desperately need to re-member.
a welcome from zulaikha:
i am a fellow dreamer, writer, Buddhist practitioner, trauma-informed embodiment facilitator, abolitionist, radical imaginal, and i believe we get free together. my work in this lifetime is to create spaces and portals where we tap into deep earth-bound, transcestral and ancestral love, to re-member who we are. through the multitudinous array of our experience here on this planet we forget that we are free and when we come together we are doing the work of re-membering.
through re-membering, we reclaim. and through our reclamation we re-imagine and build anew.
when practicing together we will center earth connected practices, trauma-informed embodiment, Buddhist practice, and radical imagination practices. these practices are offered in tandem with heart opening, and protection practices while we work closely with the intersections of power. one of the first things i teach in my courses or workshops is the intricacies of power and the systems of oppression. your inner worlds deserve to be spaces of refuge, and i hope to support you in coming back to your refuge.
i’m curious about how unseen beings, portals, time, and magic can support us as we traverse the path to liberation together. i am called to ritual and togetherness and honoring each others sovereignty. together we build tools to strengthen community with all beings because the revolution is relational.
i am a queer, gender-fluid, south asian, liberation worker. i believe in the magic that is in all of us. i offer workshops and courses where we get to explore what it means to be in deep relationship with all phenomena.
let’s traverse this magical path and embody liberation as we get free together.
Solidarity with Children Madeline Lane-McKinley
Solidarity with Children Book Launch
Madeline Lane-Mckinley
in conversation with Jo Aurelio Giardini
A SPECIAL MONDAY at 6pm EVENT! ALL AGES WELCOME!
We live in a world that is profoundly against children—evident in the genocide in Palestine, the fascist targeting of trans children, and the blatant disregard for the lives of migrant children crossing borders and oceans. It is a world in which climate catastrophe has become the new normal, in which children’s futures are by no means assured. What we need, feminist writer and scholar Madeline Lane-McKinely argues, is a politics of solidarity with children, one that sees children as comrades in our struggle for a better future.
Blending personal and political reflection with cultural analysis, Lane-McKinley examines the history of childhood as a system of private property in capitalism, showing how the idea of the child has been weaponized in the service of white supremacy and empire. She disentangles motherhood from the act of caregiving, tracing the possibilities of revolutionary mothering. And she critiques the parents’ rights movement and imagines what education might look like outside schools, considering how we might center children as we challenge the strictures of the nuclear family.
"Immediately canonical—requisite reading for any theorist writing in the field. It vividly articulates the precept that the bourgeois family is a privative force that limits collective possibilities for caring for one another."—Sarah Brouillette, Protean
"Solidarity with Children picks up discussions of family abolition and asks how this abolition can liberate children alongside women and those repressed by the patriarchal structures of family. I enthusiastically embrace Lane-McKinley’s radical vision for co-authorship alongside children for our utopian liberatory futures."—Kate Bugos, Full Stop
"Lane-McKinley brings in expansive readings from the Black feminist tradition and Wages for Housework to argue for radically changing what it means to mother."—Adora Svitak, Blind Field
"In a world that weaponizes the ideal of childhood, not least against children themselves, Lane-McKinley reveals how adult supremacy inflicts violence—from genocidal colonialism to the repressive halls of school. Rejecting mere protection and unsettling the bounds of childhood and adulthood, this book is a demand for a revolutionary solidarity with children through building a world of communal care. It draws on past and present activism to illuminate the radical politics that would empower children to become political subjects capable of mounting struggles in a world of climate catastrophe, economic crisis, and global war. Unflinching and visionary, Solidarity with Children is an indispensable guide for anyone committed to transforming the world." —Anne Boyer
Madeline Lane-McKinly
is a feminist writer, parent, and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times and Dear Z, the coauthor of Fag/Hag, and an editor for Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, and Protean Magazine.
Jo Aurelio Giardini
is from Vancouver, and teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College. They are working on two book projects: Separations: Communalist and Alter-Urban Imaginaries in 1970s American Literature; and Generic Operations: Gender Identity from Clinic to Culture.
Love Letters
Love Letters: Year 7
hosted by Roshan Abrahams and Mon M
in collaboration with Let’s Get Free
Love Letters is back! An annual valentines day reading of epistolary work and creative letters honoring June Jordan and The Temporary Sacred (from her poem New Years Eve).
Please join us for a lovely night of readings and the write some letters to some incarcerated folks in PA with The Women and Trans Prisoner Defense Committee in Pittsburgh.
featuring:
Deepali Zeer
Joselia Hughes
eae
Chanice Greenberg
Aliyah Blackmore
dash z
Ak
Sophia Gurulé
Tyler Morse
Black Abstractions: A Poetry Reading
Black Abstractions:
A Poetry Reading
Join us for a night of poetry from an all Black femme lineup. Black abstractions refers to an expansiveness within Black poetics. On February 5th, you’ll have the opportunity to hear from four Black femme poets approaching the page with their own specificity, reminding us that Blackness—and its expressions in art—contains multitudes.
Dylan Gilbert (she/her)
is a Brooklyn based poet, editor, curator, and educator from the Midwest. She holds her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and is a founding member of Saltlick Collective. Her work often deals with grief, girlhood, Blackness, and lineage. Dylan’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Maine Review, Black Warrior Review, Plumwood Mountain Journal, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere.
Kindall Gant (she/they)
is a Black femme interdisciplinary poet and New Orleans native based in Brooklyn. She experiments with visual storytelling as liberation bringing poems into conversation with expressive forms like film, visual art, music and photography. They have received support from Cave Canem, the Poetry Foundation, MASS MoCA, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Watering Hole, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Guggenheim, and Ma’s House among other arts institutions. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and appears in Seedlings, TORCH, 1619 Speaks, Brooklyn Poets, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, and Obsidian. Their book The Harlem Table is forthcoming from Phaidon.
Tangie Mitchell (she/her)
is a poet from North Carolina. Her work centers personal and collective histories of the Black American South and has been featured in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, No, Dear, Poetry Wales, Mosaic and more. She is a 2024 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, a Water Hole fellow, and an alum of the UK-based Obsidian Foundation.
Nicole Alexander (she/her)
is a poetess and educator based in Brooklyn. She graduated from Syracuse University in 2020, earning a BA in English and textual studies with a concentration in creative writing. During the warmer months, Nicole writes personalized poems for strangers in NYC parks for her social art project, A Poem, From Me To You. Her chapbook, Why I Love Dreaming, was released in 2024.
Sink or Burn with Cristy Road Carrera
Sink or Burn book launch
with Cristy Road Carrera
Celebrate the release of Cristy Road Carrera's ode to love & revolution.
In Sink or Burn, the year is 2121, and fascism has overthrown a once-thriving utopia. Amid the ashes of a fallen nation, Cheap Glitter—a queer, punk rock band—becomes the voice of resistance. As they tour across a fractured America, raising funds for the fight against a brutal regime, they navigate wildfires, sunken landscapes, and the terrifying laws of a collapsing society.
At the heart of their journey is CT, a lovelorn survivor whose romantic entanglement with a fellow bandmate—a survivor of a different war—complicates their quest for both personal healing and social revolution. As the band balances the weight of trauma with the urgency of their fight, they discover that love, however chaotic, may be their greatest weapon.
A punk rock anthem and a manifesto for the broken-hearted, Sink or Burn tells the story of a tortured artist’s evolution into a divine healer. Cristy Road Carrera, a punk rock icon and Latinx artist, weaves together individual survival with the broader struggle for liberation.
Eternal rabble rouser Cristy Road Carrera is a first generation Cuban-American artist, writer and musician. Blending anti-fascist principles with survival love stories—Road has spent over twenty-five years testifying to the beauty of the imperfect.
Her career began in 1996 with a self-published punk rock fanzine, sparking decades of illustrations for music, literature and social movements.
Forging an imprint in queer, feminist counter cultures with graphic memoirs, illustrated novels, and punk rock records; Carrera redefined her career in 2019 with the release of the Next World Tarot, a tarot card deck that envisions a world based on radical re-definitions of self-love and social justice.
Carrera has been fronting punk rock bands since her days of self-publishing fanzines. She currently performs her songs as Choked Up, making records and playing shows with the ancient punk rock ethos of passion before profit. Engaging with her world anywhere from Yale University to Bluestockings Bookstore, Carrera continues to thrive on the fringe of the mainstream, and the epicenter of revolution.
She is a gemini and works and lives in NYC and Miami.
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
It’s 2026, can we find some JOY in the Soft Apocalypse?
Turn up on January 29th as Megan Milks, Annie Tan, Kira Traber, Lori Lynn Turner, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, and Alissa Schwartz guide us.
Hosted by Kate McDonough and Grazi Ruzzante
We Pray Freedom: Prayers, Songs, and Organizing for Liberation
We Pray Freedom:
Prayers, Songs, and Organizing for Liberation
with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Dr. Charon Hribar, and contributors Steff Reed, Rev. Dr. Andrew Wilkes, and ana lara lopez
You're invited to join The Word is Change and the Kairos Center for this in-person book event for We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor.
Together, we’ll gather for an evening of healing, remembrance, and collective action—lifting up the prayers, songs, and rituals that sustain our movements for justice.
A book of prayers, rituals, and liturgies that grows out of communities committed to abolishing poverty.
Prayer has long sustained movements for social change. Ritual gives shape to our desire for justice, and liturgy lends power to our work. In We Pray Freedom, we learn from activists and movement builders the songs, stories, and ritual practices that keep them going for the long haul. The Freedom Church of the Poor, called for by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has existed in many forms; today it includes laborers, poor folks, pastors, organizers, and others bound together by a conviction: It does not have to be this way.
Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
is a theologian, pastor, author, and anti poverty activist. She is the Executive Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing in poor and low-income communities for the past 30 years.
Dr. Charon Hribar
is a song leader, cultural organizer, and social ethicist. She serves as the director of cultural strategies for the Kairos Center and co-director of theomusicology and movement arts for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. With more than two decades of experience, Dr. Hribar empowers leaders to integrate rituals and arts into organizing efforts.
Steff Reed
is a musician, organizer, and scholar whose work bridges art, activism, and healing. A proud Black man and compassionate leader, he models emotional vulnerability as a form of strength and community power. With over 20 years of experience, Steff is a GRAMMY-nominated educator and Billboard-charting artist. Steff is currently a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary pursuing a Master of Sacred Theology (STM).
Dr. Rev. Andrew Wilkes
is the cofounding, colead pastor of Double Love Experience (DLE), a Brooklyn congregation dedicated to the liberating ministry of Jesus Christ. DLE advances God’s love and justice through worship, education, organizing, and radical discipleship. He is the author of Plenty Good Room and Psalms for Black Lives.
ana lara lopez
is the Coordinator of Freedom Church of the Poor Care & Engagement for the Kairos Center. Born in Antigua, Guatemala, Ana has lived in various places that shaped her worldview. She holds a BA in Sociology/Anthropology and an MDiv in Spiritual Care & Collective Liberation.
Earthen Weapon: Brick Threats and Promises with Tamara Santibañez
Earthen Weapon:
Brick Threats and Promises
Tamara Santibañez
Artist Tamara Santibañez presents an incomplete genealogy of the brick in the radical political imagination, from the "first brick" at Stonewall, to the mysterious pallets of bricks during 2020's George Floyd uprisings, to the "reverse bricklaying" of students at Gaza solidarity encampments on campus. Discussing their own work as an oral historian and sculptor as well as the work of other artists using brick, their talk will offer a series of brick vignettes and considerations from firsthand encounters, archival research, rumors, and gossip.
Offering the brick as a way of seeing, Santibañez will discuss the paradox of the brick and brick wall, the invitations and limitations of a solo brick versus a brick in formation, and ask: What do you know of bricks? Do you know a brick when you hear it? Can you feel a brick as it's happening?
Considering the current flu and nurses strike this is a masks required event. If you don’t have one they will be provided. If you are feeling sick please skip this one and get better soon.
Tamara Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian based in Brooklyn, New York.
Their practice employs storytelling, archival research, tattooing, and craft-based sculptural techniques to interrogate the ways in which hostile architectures, borders, and coded languages are re/produced and re/interpreted on the body. They are the author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Workand the poetry chapbook Memory Lane.
Thanks to The Laundromat Project’s Create & Connect micro-grant fund that seeds and supports creative projects by cultural practitioners, community builders, organizers, and makers living in our home of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Uche Nduka & Erica Miriam Fabri
To Umber & Morphology poetry reading and book(s) launch
with Uche Nduka and Erica Miriam Fabri
We are pleased to welcome Uche Nduka, as he returns to Brooklyn with a new collections of poems To Umber, and Erica Miriam Fabri for her new collection Morphology
“‘Uche Nduka has long established himself as a master of the short, gnomic, aphoristic poem. In To Umber, he has woven strings of three- and four-line bursts of verbal melody into long tapestries of urban music. An “archaeologist at the mall,” “wary of world-weariness,” Nduka braids florilegia of observation and longing, jazzy micro-solos of dismay, desire, and delight. These poems are snappy, sassy, veering from high theory to low innuendo; they are shot through with a constant dark undercurrent of the crisis of the body politic, of the world as a whole—but warm with “a wild sort of tenderness,” alive with joy at “the fullness / Of the music of fuchsia.”
—Mark Scroggins
For Uche Nduka “the act of writing is an invitation to inquiry, argument, communion. Poetry is woven into the very fabric of the sensuous, the emotional, the political. My work leans into wonder but goes beyond just beauty. I let the poem dance in the light and shadow of all kinds of truth and experience. For me, the keyword is justice. The poems in To Umber combat stoic indifference and silence. I believe that the work of a cosmic lover is never over. In me the poetry of revolt has found its writer.”
"Where love meets language—a stunning exploration of bodies, both present and vanished"
Morphology, by definition, is the study of the forms of words and bodies. In her second book, Erica Miriam Fabri uses the formation of words—molded into poems—to celebrate and mourn various forms of bodies. The bodies featured as main characters in this collection include lovers, family members, children, ghosts, rats, jellyfish, skeletons, and snakes. While this book of poetry is set mostly in New York City, it also journeys to far-flung destinations such as outer space, the deep sea, and the afterlife.
Uche Nduka is a poet-pilgrim, collagist, and essayist presently living in New York City. He is the author of 14 volumes of poems of which the latest are Scissorwork (Roof Books, 2022) and Bainbridge Island Notebook (Roof Books, 2023). A NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry, his writing has been translated into Italian, Finnish, Turkish, Arabic, Dutch, German, Serbo-Croat, Romanian. His essays on music, poetry, mortality, politics, and travel have appeared in various online and print outlets. He teaches at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and Queens College-CUNY.
Erica Miriam Fabri is a poet and the author of two books: Morphology (Write Bloody Publishing, 2025) and Dialect of a Skirt (Hanging Loose Press, 2010). She has been widely published and worked on projects as a writer or editor for The New York Knicks, Urban Word NYC, HBO, and Nickelodeon Television. She teaches at Pace University and The College of Staten Island. She is also a Freelance Photographer, a New Yorker, and a Mama.
Be the Revolution: Jay Ponti
Be The Revolution
Book Reading and Discussion with Jay Ponti
Please join us December 28th for an evening of conversation, community, and movement-building.
The event will feature a reading from Be The Revolution: How Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders Movement Reshaped American Politics, followed by a panel discussion focusing on “Why the left keeps losing, and what it will take to defeat fascism and stop the climate apocalypse.”
in discussion with Stanley Fritz (Vera Institute of Justice) and Antonio “Tony” Rosario (Teamsters Local 804)
About the Event:
Author Jay Ponti—organizer, impact producer, and strategist—will read from his debut book, which has been praised by Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Mark Ruffalo, and other leading voices in politics, culture, and activism.
Jay has been deeply involved in frontline movements including Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and the #BankExit fossil fuel divestment campaign. He served as a top surrogate organizer for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and currently is the Director of Campaigns with Turn Left PAC. In 2024, he directed Leonardo DiCaprio’s SaveYourVote.org initiative to combat voter suppression targeting Black and Brown communities in swing states.
Following the reading, Jay will be joined by local organizers and movement leaders to discuss the path forward for the left, examining strategies for building real power, rebuilding solidarity across movements, and winning against fascism, neoliberalism, and climate collapse.
Panelists:
Stanley Fritz is the Director of State and Local Policy at the Vera Institute of Justice. In his role, Stan supports initiatives across the Institute in building and executing strategic campaigns to pass policies aiming to reduce the harms of the criminal legal and immigration systems nationwide.
Before joining Vera in 2023, Stanley spent seven years at Citizen Action of New York as Political and Campaign Director. At Citizen Action, he served as the organization’s chief lobbyist and spokesperson and led its local, state, and federal endorsement processes.
In addition to his work at Vera, Stan authors a newsletter titled Let’s Not Be Trash, which seeks to generate discussions with men about patriarchy, race, and politics through essays, podcasts, and music.
Antonio “Tony” Rosario
Lead Organizer, Teamsters Local 804
Anthony “Tony” Rosario is a veteran Teamsters organizer based in New York and serves as the New York market lead, not the entire Northeast. He has more than three decades in the labor movement, with 31 years of organizing experience.
Tony began as a UPS worker and was a striker in the historic 1997 UPS strike at just 22 years old. He later became a UPS driver and then a full-time organizer. He was a leader in the landmark 2023 UPS contract campaign and is now helping lead the charge to organize Amazon delivery workers in New York City.
He is an active member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and continues to play a key role in major union organizing campaigns across the region.
The evening will include a live Q&A and will close with a brief open share-out. Local activists are invited to share about their organizing efforts, campaigns, and ways to get involved.
★ PRAISE FOR BE THE REVOLUTION ★
“Be The Revolution offers important insights into some of the most significant developments in modern America, based on intimate knowledge and direct participation.”
— Noam Chomsky
“We should thank Jay for his life’s work. As an organizer, he is a wonder to watch in action. This accounting of events of the last ten years is a profound and seismic piece of American political and cultural history that has gone all but unnoticed in the mainstream. Be The Revolution is not about a battle of right or left, but the battle for humanity and the natural world. The timing of this book couldn’t be more right, nor the message more on point. Ken Burns should do a doc on this!”
— Mark Ruffalo
“Jay Ponti is a legendary long-distance revolutionary thinker and activist whose vision, analysis, and courage is a beacon of hope in our bleak times. Don’t miss this jewel of a book!”
— Dr. Cornel West
“Wopila (Thank you) for writing the blow-by-blow actions of the war we faced at the Oceti Sakowin Camp (Standing Rock). Jay Ponti had great influence on the two Declarations written at Oceti Sakowin, particularly the Divestment Treaty among Nations. The First Declaration defies the Doctrine of Discovery and illegal actions used by it. The second called for divestment by countries from fossil fuels, especially by DAPL and all other oil corporations. Thank you for your written words.”
— Phyllis Young, American Indian Rights Activist
YEET! Poetry Launch with jason b crawford
jason b. crawford launches YEET!
with DeeSoul Carson and Jayson P. Smith
Afrofuturist poetry that envisions Black people finding new worlds of freedom.
Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one.
YEET! is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Sawako Nakasayu.
About the poets
jason b. crawford (He/They) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025. They have been published in Poetry Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.
DeeSoul Carson is a poet & educator and hosts the O, Word? podcast. A Stanford alum, his work is featured in Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, The Offing, & elsewhere. For his work, DeeSoul has received a National Endowment for the Arts and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the NYU MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com
Jayson P. Smith is a poet, performance artist, curator & educator from the Bronx. Most recently a 2024 Hawthornden Brooklyn Writer in Residence, J's poetry has received support from NYFA, The Poetry Project, and Callaloo, among others. Recent poems have been published in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, field meridians, & html.review. Their performance work has been featured at JACK, Center for Performance Research, and The Guggenheim. Jayson founded NOMAD Readings in 2016, which they continue to host and curate. Jayson is currently a dancer with J. Bouey Dance Projects & Asę Dance Theater. Find them at www.jaysonpsmith.com.
Police Against the Movement
Joshua Clark Davis in conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika
Police Against the Movement Brooklyn Book Launch
Please join us as we help launch Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back by Joshua Clark Davis in conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika, Thursday November 6th.
Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, activists confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing department headquarters, and blocking traffic to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at derailing their movement.
“This is a civil rights story that few know. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Americans built potent grassroots movements to make this nation a more just society. Police attempts to shut down their efforts have been relentless and consistently denied and covered up. But there has always been determined activism to counter such police abuse, and to demand accountability. Joshua Clark Davis has rescued this history powerfully in this must-read book.” Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“When I was a child, my parents—both civil rights organizers—shared their suspicions that police were spying on our family and trying to destroy the Black freedom movement. In brilliant, harrowing detail, Joshua Clark Davis reveals how right they were. This lucid account exposes a chapter of American history that many hope to hide but is more relevant than ever in today’s political climate.” James Forman, Jr., Professor at Yale Law School and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own
Joshua Clark Davis is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore and the author of Police Against The Movement and From Head Shops to Whole Foods
His research has earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program. I've written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Washington Post, and my work has been highlighted in The New York Times, CNN, and Time.
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Alongside his scholarship and teaching, disciplinary service on the intersections of social justice and media, Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. He has written in scholarly venues such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, as well as public venues such as The Intercept, Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE.
The Encampments Screening+Discussion
The Encampments
Screening and Discussion
“From Executive Producer Macklemore, The Encampments offers an urgent, intimate portrait of America’s student movement, ignited at Columbia University as students protested their universities’ ties to the war on Gaza. Their actions sparked a nationwide uprising, with encampments spreading across hundreds of campuses. Featuring detained activist Mahmoud Khalil, alongside professors, whistleblowers, and organizers, the film captures the deeper stakes of a historic moment that continues to reverberate across the globe.”
Please join us for a film screening and discussion as we organize to stop the genocide and raise funds for Palestine.
DATE TBA Joy James in conversation with Jasmine Araujo
This event is being rescheduled.
Please check back for the NEW DATE
The Institute for Anarchist Studies present
Joy James in conversation with Jasmine Araujo
Join us for an evening of radical dialogue and political education with Dr. Joy James and Jasmine Araujo, presented by the Institute for Anarchist Studies on Tuesday (yes Tuesday), October 14th at 7pm.
Drawing on the recently published Confronting Counterinsurgency and Beyond Cop Cities, the discussion will address how organizers can move forward under increasing fascism and how we can stick past anarchist history to this present political movement.
Joy James is a political philosopher who works with organizers. Her books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her edited volumes include Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons and ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures.
Jasmine Araujo is currently a writer acquiring her MFA in fiction at New York University. She founded Southern Solidarity, a grassroots network that distributes 500 meals daily across two cities. She has written on liberatory mutual aid for Roar Magazine and is currently working on a novel that fictionalizes social death.
The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), established in 1996 to support the development of anarchism, is a grant-giving organization for radical writers and translators worldwide. To date, we have funded well over a hundred projects by authors from countries around the world. Equally important, we publish the Anarchist Interventions book series in collaboration with AK Press and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, the print and online journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, the Lexicon pamphlet series, and an Anarchist Imaginations series of books in collaboration with AK Press that began with Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. We organize educational events and in the past, the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference. The IAS is part of a larger movement to radically transform society. We are internally democratic and work in solidarity with people around the globe who share our values.
About Confronting Counterinsurgency: As we step into an era of rising fascism and normalized genocide, Confronting Counterinsurgency: Cop Cities and Democracy's Terrorsis an invaluable contribution to the fightback.
Joy James brings together the voices of frontline activists, artists, and organizers from movements against militarism and state violence in the USA, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Palestine, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and within prison walls. The book includes accessible and revealing discussions of the role of institutions, universities and nonprofit organizations in the suppression of radical movements. It introduces and analyzes contemporary militarized policing projects like Cop City, ICE, and the School of the Americas, and links them to historical and contemporary settler colonialism and slavery.
Made as an offering of revolutionary love, Confronting Counterinsurgency will be a crucial tool for deepening and radicalizing our analysis and learning from each other's movements, in order to strengthen our resistance and unite to fight for a better world.
Reading plus cake with Mary Paula Hunter (MPH)
Please join us for a reading by performance artist Mary Paula Hunter (MPH) from her new book Can I Have a Hug First
And you won’t want to miss the cake made by Peter Hunter Meckel
CAN I HAVE A HUG FIRST? is a short story collection born out of author Mary Paula Hunter's career as a performance artist. Her monologues turned short stories feature midlife adults struggling to align their crazy minds with an equally crazy world. Hilarious and tragic in a high-energy mix, these stories will get the reader questioning what came first- the whacked mind or the whacked world?
Mary Paula Hunter is a writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. She received early praise for her writing when as a dancer and choreographer, she told stories about her eccentric Midwestern family while she danced.
Laurie Stone, in the now-defunct VILLAGE VOICE wrote that Mary Paula’s writing was brilliant. Jennifer Dunning in THE NEW YORK TIMES also praised her hybrid work, especially the honest storytelling. Finally the writing won out… although she still creates dances (mainly in her kitchen), and works on performance art projects.
The NYT writes: “Peter Hunter Meckel, 36, a Brooklyn-based baker inspired by the grandeur of Victorian-era sweets, uses chiffon in his outsize sculptural cakes adorned with edible strings of pearls and portraits of imaginary duchesses. Creating his signature sweets — which he’s made for weddings and fashion world parties — required a fair amount of trial and error. Whipping egg whites to just the right frothiness for maximum height takes practice, he says, and, because chiffon is prone to collapsing under weight, layered cakes can require meticulous engineering, including reinforcement with dowels and cardboard. Still, Meckel is drawn to chiffon’s airy delicacy and notes that its sugar-to-flour ratio is lower than that of traditional butter cakes. “A lot of desserts are just so sweet you can’t eat very much of them,” he says. “This is a nice change of pace.”
Duvall, Shelley by Laura Henriksen Book Launch
Laura Henriksen // Bahaar Ahsan // Mel Elberg // Teline Trần
An overlap of place, a link in times, Laura Henriksen’s Duvall, Shelley is an invitation to come over, to watch a movie, to hold a seánce that calls on a star. A lyric reflection on desire, decay, resurrection and survival. An index for monsters and their fans.
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Laura Henriksen is the author of Laura’s Desires (Nightboat, 2024) and Duvall, Shelley (Newest York, 2025). Her writing can be found in LitHub, shitwonder, and other places. She lives in Bed-Stuy, Lenapehoking and teaches writing at Pratt Institute. She worked for a long time at the Poetry Project.
Bahaar Ahsan is a poet from the Bay Area living in New York City. Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s). She is the author of Gay Girl Hyacinth (Eyelet 2021) and work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books), and elsewhere.
Mel Elberg is a genderqueer poet and artist working across print, performance, video, memory, games, and long-term collaborative endeavors.
Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn and the Development Manager at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. Their work appears in Social Text Online, No, Dear Magazine, The Poetry Project, diaCRITICS, and MONO NO AWARE. Their first chapbook is Ad Học, published with Wendy's Subway (2023).
Leopoldina Fortunati and Sarah Leonard
Leopoldina Fortunati
in conversation with Sarah Leonard
Please join us for a discussion of the new edition of Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso 2025) as we explore the work’s implications for the politics of reproduction in an age of austerity and counter-revolution.
Emerging from the great social upheavals that challenged the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Fortunati’s work is a crucial contribution to contemporary discussions of social reproduction. The Arcana unveils the hidden structures behind the reproduction of the labor force, exposing capitalism's reliance on unpaid, often invisible reproductive labor—primarily performed by women. Combining Marxist critical political economy with feminist theory, her approach demonstrates that care, domestic work, and sexual labor are integral to capitalist production, positioning women as strategic actors in the composition of revolutionary class forces. Ultimately, it demands radical social change to value and liberate reproductive labor from capitalist exploitation. Fortunati will be in conversation with Sarah Leonard.
Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.
Sarah Leonard is the editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. Leonard is a contributing editor to Dissent and the Nation, and her writing has been widely published.
About the book
Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.
Praise for The Arcana of Reproduction
“The Arcana of Reproduction is a true tour de force, unique both in the world of Marxism and Feminism. Whereas Marxist-Feminists have generally only elaborated on the significance of Marx’s work for understanding women’s oppression and exploitation, Fortunati ‘sweeps away’ our common sense notions of production and reproduction by testing Marxian categories through their unorthodox application to the realm of reproduction. The result is a painstaking analysis that explores these two interlocking spheres as both interdependent and different—radically unsettling our understanding of both.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch
“This excellent edition, wonderfully edited and translated, with insightful supplementary texts by Federici and the author, demonstrates the contemporary importance of this classic feminist text.”
—Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies
“The Arcana of Reproduction is a must-read because it is an at once singular and path-breaking contribution to Marxist feminist theorizations of the capitalist production/reproduction system and because of the powerful estrangement—from domestic labor, from the institution of the heteropatriarchal family, from the gendered ideologies of work—that it continues to provoke.”
—Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
Joy in the Soft Apocalypse
Come on out for the next edition of Joy in the Soft Apocalypse because we definitely need some joy in this apocalypse!! Your hosts have assembled a great line up guaranteed to create a night of joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe. Fans of Rocky Horror will not want to miss.
with readings by:
Heather Maria Acs
Emily Elkins
Deena El Genaidi
Margot Atwell
Jon Meharg
Dare Campbell
and your hosts Kate McDonough and Grazi Ruzzante
Brooklyn Book Festival
We’ll be tabling September 21st at the Brooklyn Book Festival so come see us and a ton of other Brooklyn bookstores and publishers. There will be a TON of FREE AUTHOR READINGS too so keep an eye on the schedule and we’ll see you there.
Never Mind Gaza with Yahya Ahsour
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: Andrew Ross
The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates
Andrew Ross, with Ashley Dawson and Jaskiran Dhillion
A Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event
From acclaimed public scholar Andrew Ross, groundbreaking reporting on climate change and the horizons of a just future from Palestine, UAE, Arizona, and China.
We are pleased to celebrate the publication of Andrew Ross’s newest book, The Weather Report, on Sunday, September 14th. Andrew will be joined by Ashley Dawson and Jaskiran Dhillion for a wide-ranging conversation that seeks to reveal the mutual aid projects seeking to provide care in the faces of climate crisis.
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.
New York City Anarchist Bookfair
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 reading group (session “one”)
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.
How is fascist subjectivity produced and how might we sabotage this production process?
These are the questions we will explore in our reading of On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death, which offers a compelling account of the diffuse cultural forces that form the building blocks of later fascist movements and state power. MAGA may have its billionaire backers, but what remains to be explained is why the call to “Make America Great Again” inspired so many.
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.
Ben Gantcher, Maggie Dubris, Brendan Lorber, Jeffrey Joe Nelson
Get Your Anti-Zombie Booster Shot!
A poetry reading (& launch) with
Benjamin Gantcher (The Coronation of Ghosts)
Maggie Dubris (Brokedown Palace)
Brendan Lorber (If This Is Paradise Whay Are We Still Driving?)
Jeffrey Joe Nelson (Postcards from the Hive)
Poetry = proven inoculation
against the brain-eater contagion
that’s infecting the nation.
The Word Is Change has the cure!
Benjamin Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center. He is the author of the poetry collection Snow Farmer (2017), a finalist in several contests, and the poetry chapbook Strings of Math and Custom (2013). Gantcher's first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Slate, Rhino, Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, and DIAGRAM. Gantcher was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets and is a former poetry editor of failbetter. He is the editor, publisher and designer of unbound books, "free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books," that can be found @benjamingantcher, at the unbound books Substack, and at https: //gantcher.wordpress.com/unbound-books/.
Maggie Dubris is a writer and sound artist based in New York City. She worked for 25 years as a 911 paramedic in the Times Square/Hell’s Kitchen area, and much of her work draws on that experience. She has also worked as a professional hypnotist, a martial arts health care specialist for Kids Kicking Cancer, and a paramedic on film and TV sets. Maggie is the author of The Favored Child of the Sub-Mariner, (Weed Mines Press, 2023), BrokeDown Palace (Subpress, November 2019), In The Dust Zone (with artist Scott Gillis), Skels, Weep Not, My Wanton, and WillieWorld. Her work has been featured in David Gordon’s America and Mabou Mines’ Song For New York, and she has published in numerous literary magazines.
Brendan Lorber is the author of If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving? and several chapbooks, most recently Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems. His work appears in the American Poetry Review, Big Other, Fence, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Since 1995, he has published and edited Lungfull! Magazine, an annual anthology of contemporary literature. He lives atop the tallest hill in Brooklyn, New York, in a little castle across the street from a five-hundred-acre necropolis.
Jeffrey Joe Nelson lives & works in Brooklyn. He has been curating the Greetings Readings Performance Series at Unnameable Books before it was deemed unnameable. His, "Road Of A Thousand Wonders," is available from Ugly Duckling Presse.
Dare To Struggle NYC (Discussion Group) Two articles from Going Against the Tide
Two Articles from Going Against the Tide journal
Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group
Rescheduled date fro,m last month (due to downpours)
On August 28th the Radical Book Club Meetings facilitated by Dare To Struggle NYC will be discussing two articles from Going Against the Tide: A Journal Charting a Path for Communist Revolution in the US.
You do not have to have read the articles to attend, but, of course, it’s great if you have. Copies are available at the store.
Joy James in conversation with Steff Reed
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
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.