Haymarket Books

Winner of the Palestine Book Awards 2024 Creative Award

A unique, stunning collection of images of Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a testament to the vibrancy of Palestinian society prior to occupation.

This book tells the story, in both English and Arabic, of a land full of people—people with families, hopes, dreams, and a deep connection to their home—before Israel’s establishment in 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Denying Palestinian existence has been a fundamental premise of Zionism, which has sought not only to hide this existence but also to erase its memory.

But existence leaves traces, and the imprint of the Palestine that was remains, even in the absence of those expelled from their lands. It appears in the ruins of a village whose name no longer appears in the maps, in the drawing of a lost landscape, in the lyrics of a song, or in the photographs from a family album.

Co-edited by Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro and featuring a foreword by Mohammed El-Kurd, the photographs in this book are traces of that existence that have not been erased. They are testament not to nostalgia, but to the power of resistance.

A deeply reported analysis of the connections between policing and capitalism, centering global lessons of revolt and resistance

Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.

Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice.

Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation.

In What We Do with God, Daniella Toosie-Watson collapses the division among humans, the natural world, and the divine.

Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection meditates on the politics of mental health, pleasure, and the natural world. In this book, the everyday miracles of insects are studied, celebrated, and made sacrosanct. Prayer and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Propriety has no bearing on sensual connection and exploration. The poet calls upon Puerto Rican, Iranian, and Russian inheritance to explore where, why, and how ancestral mysticism and Western pathology intersect and/or diverge. The speaker finds those questions mirrored back as they maneuver through the stark realities of the US mental health care system.

What We Do with God dives into the grotesque, the bestial, the surreal, as a means to defamiliarize abuse. Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection is a practice of reclamation.

With an unapologetic impiety to holiness and waywardness, What We Do with God invites readers to enter a world where care extends beyond ourselves and those closest to us to ecosystems holding the wider world together.

This gripping graphic novel tells the story of the 1891 Coal Creek War—one of the most significant yet overlooked labor and abolitionist uprisings in the history of the United States.

Told through the eyes of a young Welsh immigrant, Trouble! at Coal Creek is the epic story of a cross-racial struggle to abolish the system of convict-leasing in the mines. Austin Sauerbrei's evocative black-and-white illustrations and masterful storytelling show the personal battles and motivations that led thousands of miners to repeatedly take up arms against the powerful companies, their militias, and politicians.

Lured by coal companies’ promises of good pay, stability, and opportunity, the narrator’s father brought their family across the Atlantic Ocean for work in the mine. The job, however, was deadly, and life grew unbearable as the coal companies immiserated miners and their families. Meanwhile, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, racist terror, and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan were still fresh memories for most. Coal companies relied increasingly on the forced labor of mostly Black prisoners who were loaned out from the state, an extremely profitable continuation of the old system of racist brutality. As Ida B. Wells noted at the time, "The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand."

The miners of Coal Creek, however, set fire to the edifice of convict-leasing and inspired similar rebellions throughout the South. In this captivating graphic novel, Saurbrei brings their overlooked story to life for new generations of organizers.

Forgiveness is necessary in the long fight for a just world—but it is only possible after the oppressed are victorious.

For too long, revolutionary social movements have reconciled to defeat. We must start winning again. Forgiveness is a crucial strategy for remaking the world, to secure and sustain victories, to turn one-time enemies into friends.

With deep political commitment and lucid moral clarity, D.K. Renton makes the case for forgiveness, but of a particularly unruly sort. Tracing the tragic abuse of Eleanor Marx and Jane Wells, the mistakes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the courage of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye, Renton urges us to forgive, but only after tearing down the citadels of the rich.

Revolutionary Forgiveness merges history with philosophy, infuses politics with ethics, and connects collective struggle with the individual’s search for justice to demand a future for all—when the oppressed will be magnanimous in power, and even former oppressors will be free.

Every December in downtown St. Louis, the city’s upper crust gathers for a garish costume party that doubles as a debutante’s ball, a ceremony in which the daughters of high society are paraded toward a cloaked figure in the center of the room who will select one young woman as the “Queen.” Known as the Veiled Prophet’s Ball, at first glance the event is easy to dismiss as outdated and clownish. But the truth is that the Veiled Prophet Society has functioned as a space of solidarity for the city’s “fathers,” the wealthy men at the head of businesses, banks, and whole industries who come together to break strikes, quash protests, and enforce racial hierarchies.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet is the definitive history of the Veiled Prophet Society in all its violence and pageantry, offering a colorful alternate history of this Midwestern city through the lens of labor politics, racial inequality, and capital accumulation. O’Shea follows the Veiled Prophet Society from its origins in the wake of the 1877 railroad workers’ strike, the height of its, and St. Louis’s, influence during the 1904 World’s Fair, and the unexpected places its members exerted influence across the globe, from Rhodesia and Vietnam to the halls of power in Washington, DC.

Yet the power wielded by the Veiled Prophet has not gone uncontested. Orphans armed with simple pea-shooters rose up against the secret society in the late 19th century. Communists organized against them in the 1930s. And civil rights icons and renegade debutantes defied this shadowy band of ruling class elites in the 1960s. The most recent challenge to the Veiled Prophet’s influence was The Ferguson uprising of 2014. Now, as the fight for the soul and streets of St. Louis is as charged as ever, it’s critical that we understand and expose the long sordid history of this powerful masked society, and its ongoing impact on the ordinary people living in the city.

A riveting and moving memoir, portraying the intense struggle for freedom in South Africa.

Apartheid in South Africa was arbitrary and ferocious―its end is widely celebrated. Yet, the monumental difficulties faced by the anti-apartheid movement and the sacrifices made by individuals have been hidden in the broad sweep of time.

Beloved journalist Lionel Morrison brings this history to life again, honouring his forgotten comrades. He shares memories as a defendant alongside Nelson Mandela in the Treason Trials, being forced to leave South Africa, meeting leaders of the non-aligned movement, the heady days of Third World nationalism, fighting subtle racism in Britain, and much more. With sharp intellect and warm humour, Morrison’s stories reveal the intimate experience of grand geopolitical shifts―and how politics is lived.

Completed by Liz Morrison after her husband’s death, Footprints is an ode to community, truth, and resistance.

From the author of Enemy Feminisms and Abolish the Family, a fierce critique of femmephobia within feminism, and a vision of a life-giving femme feminism for all.

For two centuries, feminists have tried to be respectable and serious. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital political importance of “femmeness”: a femininity that is self-consciously artificial, a femininity whose erotic and political appetites are considered unacceptable and unnatural. Being femme is a kind of work that merits love and respect—but femmes instead face criticism from antagonists and feminist allies alike. 

Where neoliberal women’s empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on tradwives and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity and a poet who mothered against motherhood, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminized people. 

A collection of lyrical and experimental poems, Mermaid Theory redefines the page to visually and textually enact the struggles and celebrations of Arab-American femininity.

In her second full-length collection, Maya Salameh offers a profound exploration of Arab-American identity, weaving together themes of myth, science, and cultural heritage. Salameh’s innovative poetic forms blur the lines between ancient myth and psychological scholarship.

Mermaid Theory boldly reimagines Arab-American womanhood in the modern military age, deploying psychological evaluation forms, ritual incantations, and other texts as visual lyric poems to deepen the reader’s engagement. Salameh transcends simple narratives of shame or violence to offer a nuanced portrayal of identity, exploring both the privileges and heartbreaks of diasporic exile. Her multilingual poetry bridges Arabic and English, enriching the poems’ sonic texture. 

We live in a moment of interlocking and compounding crises that many commentators have aptly termed the ‘polycrisis.’  Rampant inequality. Unchecked climate change. A global pandemic. And now, seething international divisions and the escalatory spiral of war and state violence. As the world moves toward the end of the 2020s, each of the pieces of this mosaic are becoming impossible to ignore, but how do they all fit together? And where is it all heading?

To answer these questions, economist and marxist commentator Michael Roberts draws on his forty-plus years of experience working in various financial institutions in the City of London to provide an empirically grounded and wide ranging appraisal of the global situation. 

Roberts takes readers on a tour of the contemporary global economy, first by turning back to the Great Recession of 2008, and then offering a granular look at the economic priorities and contradictions of every region of the world. His analysis unearths the fault lines left behind by our most recent financial meltdown and how they fuel the economic engines driving the ecological crisis and resurgence of inter-imperial conflict.

What emerges from this accounting of the polycrisis is the inescapable fact that capitalism’s rapacious drive toward profit over and against any geopolitical boundaries or plenary limits threatens both humanity and the planet. 

Offering a bold critique of the limitations of the reparations and land back movements, When We Are Kin envisions a Black and Indigenous future rooted in real solidarity, a future that exists beyond the confines of the liberal imagination.

Current advocates of reparations for slavery and land back often fail to scrutinize racial capitalism and settler colonialism, instead accepting that their destinies will be forever tied to US empire. But as scholar Kyle T. Mays insists in When We Are Kin, we can and should demand a kind of repair that goes beyond a white supremacist idea of what justice can be.

In a series of short essays, Mays traces the history of alliances between Black and Indigenous movements; outlines the limitations of certain demands for reparations, including cash payments, that do not fundamentally critique racial-settler capitalism; and interrogates contemporary land back initiatives that displace Black residents. Along the way, he asks, What does solidarity look like between Black and Indigenous peoples in the United States? Can we find ways to co-belong and co-resist on Turtle Island?

Drawing on the Anishinaabe philosophy of mino-bimaadiziwin (the good life), Mays argues that we can resist as kin only when we center the land in building our collective futures.

In this captivating account of two of the most corrupt and blood-soaked chapters in Chicago law enforcement history, award-winning lawyer and author of The Torture Machine Flint Taylor draws on his vast experience to guide readers through the sordid world of prosecutorial misconduct and police violence

This compelling follow-up to his exposé of systemic police torture within the CPD looks at the roles of Cook County prosecutors and Democratic machine politicians in covering up both those widespread abuses, and the political assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. This story begins with a focus on then rising political star Edward V. Hanrahan, who, in his position as state’s attorney, authorized the notorious police raid on Hampton’s apartment and then vociferously orchestrated a cover-up that took more than a decade to completely unravel. Taylor shows how Hanrahan’s racist political strategy would ultimately lead to his own political downfall following the efforts of a Black-led movement.

Taylor traces the ways that Hanrahan’s legacy was continued and brought to bear on the case of Jackie Wilson, a victim of police torture wrongfully incarcerated for thirty-six years, thanks in large part to the same style of racist prosecutorial misconduct. Drawing on unique insights gained from his position as one of the leading lawyers in opposition, Taylor deftly guides readers through the numerous twists and turns of Wilson’s forty-year effort that not only won an innocent man his freedom but also resulted in the criminal indictment of a Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney who played an important role in this shameful history.

Leading readers through this saga, Taylor asks whether there can be such a thing as effective progressive prosecutors dedicated to fair and equal justice in such an inherently unjust and systemically racist legal system.

“Hope, courage, and insurrection have crossed bodies, territories, and all borders.”—from Revolutions of Our Times

This urgent declaration advances an internationalism from below, focused on people and movements rather than states, as agents of our collective liberation. Revolutions of Our Times draws on the experience of uprisings taking place across the globe over the past two decades and sets out a vision for revolutionary internationalism.

From continent to continent, from our exile, in our travels and in our struggles, we have found each other. In the clash of street battles, gestures seen and then replicated in different countries, words echoed across languages, we have recognized each other.  We belong to a single transnational struggle—and we stand against an internationally organized elite. We know that if we remain isolated, we will achieve nothing.

The bitterness of our defeats, and our refusal to accept them as final, has engendered the desire to get to know each other. We have begun to weave a network of planetary connections from frontlines to popular assemblies, from feminist strikes to resistance committees, from occupied roundabouts to occupied forests, and have discovered a common sensibility.

New York Times Bestseller

In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

“I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take,” Solnit writes in the introduction, “the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past.”

An unorthodox, irreverent, and battle-tested strategy for workers ready to leverage the power we already have.

We know how our workplaces should be, but they’re changing for the worse. We know how we want the world to be, too, but billionaires are doing their best to make things fall apart. 

Unions of Our Own provides a radical, step-by-step framework for workers who want to fight for the better workplaces they’ve always envisioned—and dream of bigger changes, too. In a world teeming with union-busters and bad bosses, Daniel Gross reveals the eight building blocks needed to build a sustainable labor union that can actually stand up for workers’ needs.

Cookie-cutter organizing methods and traditional models are often ineffective. It takes something more: it takes you and your coworkers. From first conversations with those coworkers to the actualization of real, collective power, Unions of Our Own will offer a potent antidote to the idea that change is impossible.

Through practical tools and real-world examples, Unions of Our Own is an actionable, inspiring, and confidence-boosting handbook on how to win the workplace—and the world—you deserve.

A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics

The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.

Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.

A powerful collection of testimonies from Palestinians facing genocide and displacement in Gaza with hope and resistance.

Displaced in Gaza aims to raise global awareness of how violent displacement has impacted the lives of Palestinians—students, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, educators, and those who already survived the Nakba of 1948. In Gaza, 2.3 million Palestinians have been subjected to starvation, mass destruction, and targeted killing. Yet they endure.

This book is a commitment to the longstanding Palestinian tradition of storytelling, documenting both the horror of the genocide and the resilience of the Palestinian people. The stories in this collection are not merely accounts of suffering, they are assertions of humanity, resistance, hope, and the unbreakable bond that ties Palestinians to their homeland.

Displaced in Gaza is a collaboration between the American Friends Service Committee and the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at Universiti Malaya.

Esta colección debut de poesía exige la abolición de la vigilancia policial y el encarcelamiento humano. En Diarios de Terrorista Christopher Soto usa el pronombre "nosotros" para enfatizar que la violencia policial no solo afecta a individuos, sino a comunidades enteras.

Su poética abre la imaginación hacia posibilidades de existencia más allá del status quo. Soto pregunta: "¿A quién llamamos terrorista y por qué?" Estos poemas, de surrealismo político, se mueven entre la vulnerabilidad desgarradora, el humor que hace reír a carcajadas y la irreverencia punk queer sin disculpas. Diarios de un Terrorista es innovador en su capacidad para hablar, desde una escala local hasta una global, sobre uno de los problemas más importantes de nuestro tiempo.

Rooted in a Chicago-based street gang, the Young Lords grew into one of the most dynamic revolutionary community organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s. 

In their field jackets and signature purple berets, using militant tactics like building takeovers and mass education, the Young Lords mobilized their community for liberation and against gentrification, poverty, racism, and police brutality. Forging a Rainbow Coalition with Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords expanded from their Chicago headquarters into the Puerto Rican and Latino barrios of New York City and elsewhere, demanding an end to the US occupation of Puerto Rico and self-determination for oppressed communities everywhere.

With a foreword by founder José "Cha Cha" Jiménez, written just before his passing, The Young Lords Speak tells the story of Chicago's Young Lords in their own words through articles, essays, interviews, and speeches. 

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor documents the overlooked history and lasting influence of the International Socialists through the words of its members.

Founded at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a radical civil rights group, the International Socialist Club sparked the Free Speech Movement that same year, and its members and successor organizations would go on to help shape the course of both the Black freedom struggle and the rank-and-file labor insurgency of the 1970s. From its inception, the organization adhered to the tenets of “socialism from below”—the belief that revolutionary Marxism meant an expansion of democracy, not its curtailment at the hands of bureaucratic dictatorships that claimed to be building socialist societies. 

Following their success in the Bay Area, the ISC launched chapters across the country, forging an alliance with the Black Panthers to promote Huey P. Newton’s candidacy on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. In 1969, the ISC became the International Socialists, and much of its growing membership relocated to the Midwest to take industrial jobs. In their final years, among other important efforts, the IS created a majority-Black youth group known as the Red Tide, founded the seminal publication Labor Notes, and helped create Teamsters for a Democratic Union. 

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor includes twenty-six original reflections by leading members—including renowned scholar-activists Nelson Lichtenstein and Nancy Holmstrom—offering invaluable insights into this influential but little-known organization. 

A provocative analysis of the deadly conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington.

Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable wastelands, surrogate wars in the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer a new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern world history.

McCoy offers an intimate portrait of covert operatives and young antiwar protesters, humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.

By showing how otherwise ordinary individuals helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust, McCoy offers important lessons for a younger generation facing climate change even as the great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources to a “new cold war.”

A hard-hitting exploration of how state policy displaces and isolates Black communities and how collective resistance creates spaces for working-class people of color to identify the true cause of conflict as capitalism and white supremacy

Marginalized communities often become understandably preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem them disposable, making it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hyper-segregation, and dispossession. Under these impossible circumstances people are often quicker to punch each other before they identify the enemy as white supremacy and capitalism, creating a society where conflict is engineered.

Examining the long fight of Black people in Chicago to claim their humanity and thrive in a city while facing school closings, the destruction of public housing and oppressive law enforcement, Stovall argues that marginalized communities face unique structural challenges while being blamed for interpersonal conflict and labeled “violent” and deemed disposable. With a novel approach to the question of how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impacts low-income communities, Engineered Conflict uses examples from Chicago’s recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability through housing instability, criminalization, and school closures. Looking at all three phenomena together allows readers to see how state policies designate some neighborhoods as unviable, where disinvestment furthers a rationale to contain members of these communities.

Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population.

Socialism is a yearning for justice, community, and the greater realization of human potential. Cornel West calls it, “the best accessible and reliable treatment we have of what socialism is, was, and should be.”

Understanding Socialism is a plainspoken text that disarms false narratives, confronts past failures, and offers a path to a fresh and modern understanding of socialism, by outlining what democracy in the workplace could look like.

Wolff not only explains what socialism is and has meant to its various proponents, he also looks at the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a model to help us visualize an evolution from our current socioeconomic state.

Understanding Socialism explores how socialist theory was used and applied to help shape the histories of countries such as Russia and China, and beyond. Wolff also analyzes the successes and defeats of those countries, the world's reactions to them, and how they offer important lessons for the building of a democratic, worker-controlled 21st-century socialism.

Richard D. Wolff masterfully explains why Karl Marx’s analysis of class struggle is fundamental to a proper understanding of capitalism and explores how to build a more sustainable democratic society.

Class struggle is everywhere, and it influences everything and everyone in our society. Marx is the person who first explained this struggle systematically. For Marx, capitalism signified not the end of history, but rather the latest phase of human development that leads ordinary people to rid themselves of “all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."

Marx’s theories are deeply prescient and relevant in our efforts to understand and cope with the crises of our time. Every day, we see more evidence that the capitalist system is both undermining itself and those whose labor it depends on, as Marx predicted.

Understanding Marxism is an essential resource for looking at the power and usefulness of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economic system—and how we can move beyond it to a truly sustainable and democratic society based on workers’ self-management.

A major work in the Black Communist tradition by worker-intellectual Harry Haywood, now in a new edition featuring a foreword by Dr. Rebecca Hall and an introduction by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly.

In 1948, Harry Haywood, a leading member of the Communist Party USA, published Negro Liberation, a pathbreaking book that lays out his argument that the Black Belt South constitutes a distinct nation and an internal colony of U.S. imperialism. Applying a Marxist-Leninist lens to questions of nationalism, colonialism, and land distribution, Haywood lays out the dire stakes of Jim Crow violence and oppression and critiques the emptiness and insufficiency of liberal solutions. Along the way, he makes a powerful case for Black self-determination.

Framed by Rebecca Hall’s moving meditation on her father’s legacy and Charisse Burden-Stelly’s clear-eyed case for how Haywood reveals the contradiction between ruling-class politics and Black liberation today, this new edition of Negro Liberation is a must-read for anyone fighting against oppression.

“Why does capitalism fail us?” Richard D. Wolff walks readers through this pressing question in a brilliant takedown of an economic system that benefits the few at the great expense of the many.

Understanding Capitalism explores the different definitions of what capitalism is and is not, and dissolves the many myths that, Wolff argues, are designed to confuse and disorient us. Wolff doesn’t simply identify the crises and harms manufactured by capitalism, he details a path forward by outlining alternative economic models that combat the exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalism.

Capitalism oftentimes feels as permanent as the sky above. Understanding Capitalism shows that our current economic system is only as strong as the ordinary people who enable its existence, and that capitalism’s demise requires an organized, collective effort by those who can identify its vulnerabilities and limitations, but also understand that another world is indeed possible.

A revolutionary feminist case for child liberation, a utopian project that helps us imagine ways to build insurgent, collective forms of care. 

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. 

Elegantly written and provocative, Solidarity with Children is a book for anyone who cares about children and the struggle for a better world.

The definitive history of the US labor movement’s complicity in Zionist settler colonialism, and a call for today’s labor militants to organize in solidarity with Palestinians.

US trade unionists are often told to keep quiet and remain neutral on Palestine because “Palestine has nothing to do with unions” and “weighing in” only distracts from struggles for better working conditions. 

No Neutrals There makes a timely and critical intervention against that pervasive sentiment by recounting the history of the US labor movement’s century-long involvement in the struggle for Palestine. Scholar Jeff Schuhrke convincingly demonstrates that unions in the United States have never been silent or neutral on the question of Palestine. In fact, they have played a key role—in the initial Zionist colonization of Palestine, the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, supporting US foreign policy commitments to Israel, and the ongoing suppression of the Palestinian liberation movement.

In his compelling telling of this history, Schuhrke conclusively shows that US unions helped build and maintain the state of Israel, and also shines a light on important exceptions to this rule: instances of US labor solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle that point the way forward for today’s labor movement.

From leading abolitionist organizers, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that purport to protect children make our communities less safe for them.

Based on decades of shared organizing, study, and lived experience, the contributors to How to End Family Policing argue that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. Rather than the misleading language of “child welfare” and “child protective services,” scholars and activists use the term “family policing” to name the fact that these institutions and practices are neither neutral nor benign.

Black, Indigenous, and Latinx parents do not mistreat their children at higher rates than white parents. Yet 53 percent of all Black children in the United States will experience a child protective services investigation before the age of eighteen.

Offering first-person testimony, alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this book is an urgent call to build flourishing communities.

With contributions from Corey B. Best, Annie Chambers, Noran Elzarka, Brianna Harvey, Shira Hassan, Shawn Koyano, jaboa lake, Elizabeth Ling, Leah Plasse, Margaret Prescod, zara raven, Ignacio G. Hutía Xeiti Rivera, Dorothy Roberts, Arneta Roger, Lisa Sangoi, jasmine Sankofa, Kylee Sunderlin, Jasmine Wali, E. Zimiles, and the editors.

A collection of bold and tender writing on June Jordan’s multidimensional legacy as a poet, healer, and activist.

This Unruly Witness was curated for people who see love as a life force, who seek a community that can sustain us, who know that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Celebrating the life and legacy of the poet activist June Jordan, this collection illuminates why we need Jordan more than ever.

Featuring a foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an afterword from Imani Perry, essays, poems, letters, and interviews from internationally acclaimed poets and thinkers such as Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Afaa M. Weaver, E. Ethelbert Miller, and many other people touched by Jordan’s work.

Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized.

The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism.

What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.

If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.

In this essential intervention, Venezuelan socialists analyze the origins and causes of their country’s crisis and offer a critique of the Maduro regime.

Venezuela in Crisis brings together a diverse array of Venezuelan thinkers and activists to grapple with the question of how and why the aspirations for what Hugo Chavez deemed “socialism in the twenty-first century” gave way to the deepest economic collapse in all of South America. While recognizing the devastating impact of sanctions, this collection’s authors reject the simplistic view that all would be well if not for US meddling. Rather, they argue that from governmental mismanagement to rising repression, the regime of Nicolás Maduro deserves a significant share of the blame for Venezuela’s ongoing crisis. 

With chapters focused on the Maduro government’s economic policies, its continuities and breaks from the Chávez era, its erosion of democratic processes in the country, and its doubling down on extractivism, Venezuela in Crisis is an indispensable guide for international solidarity activists and for anyone looking for a nuanced understanding of Venezuela’s crisis.

Writing from an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian perspective, this volume never loses sight of the need to stand with the Venezuelan people rather than their government—even when it claims to be struggling to build socialism. 

A story of struggle and perseverance from an Eastern Kentucky woman who answered Florence Reese's timeless question, "Which side are you on?" by organizing her people with love and solidarity.

In Song for a Hard-Hit People, activist and organizer Beth Howard shares her stories of life in Appalachian Kentucky, where her family struggled with coal bosses, cops, and the cruel tragedies of working-class life. Her dad, sometimes violent and abusive, often compassionate and inspiring, was an itinerant worker in the region’s coal industry who inspired her unrepentant rebelliousness. The women in her life contended with ever-present male chauvinism, modeling a kind of feminism Beth didn’t yet have the language for.

These complex men and women shaped Beth’s sense of justice and solidarity, and taught her from an early age about the inextricable bonds working-class people share, despite our differences. She began to learn the powerful history of white Appalachians fighting alongside Black and Brown people, pushing back against billionaires who gain power by using racism to divide them. Today, Beth is a leading organizer in the fight for working-class antiracism, part of a long tradition of Appalachian organizers and movements who put solidarity into practice.

Beth’s story is particular but not uncommon. Too many of us face the same struggle for the basic necessities of life: somewhere decent to live, good food to eat, health care that doesn't break the bank, jobs that don't kill us. As she reminds us, we haven’t got a chance—unless we organize.

In the best of storytelling traditions, Beth's prose is at once heart-breaking and inspiring, insightful and provocative, and filled to the brim with courageous humanity.

A longtime educator explores how the study of Black history challenges our understanding of race, nation, and the stories we tell about who we are.

Black history is under attack from powerful forces that seek to excise it from classrooms, libraries, and the popular imagination. Yet its opponents fail to understand a simple truth: the best education makes us uncomfortable. It challenges our assumptions, helps us see larger forces at work, and gives us glimpses of alternate futures.

In Black History Is for Everyone, Brian Jones offers a meditation on the power of Black history, using his own experiences as a lifelong learner and classroom teacher to question everything—from the radicalism of the American Revolution to the meaning of “race” and “nation.”

With warmth and immersive storytelling, Jones encourages us to delve deeper into our collective history, explores how curiosity about our world is essential—and reminds us that with stakes so high, the effort is worth it.

In this series of personal, political, and literary essays, Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve and solidarity in the face of the advancing climate crisis and widening political abyss.

After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.

Born of his own struggle, Learning to Live in the Dark is Stephenson’s argument for resolve in the face of an intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss.  In essays that reach back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Vaçlav Havel, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon—and back to Thoreau and Dostoevsky in the 19th century—Stephenson finds a constant among these iconic figures—a resolute embrace of universal human solidarity in dark times.   

Engaging with contemporary writers along the way—including William T. Vollmann, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Andreas Malm, China Miéville, and Jane Hirshfield—Stephenson charts a personal and political journey from the horrors of Trump’s first presidency; through a renewed political engagement via the Green New Deal and his ongoing commitment to escalated nonviolent direct action; to a moral reckoning in the depths of the COVID pandemic and on up to the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza. Throughout, Stephenson poses a question that resonates for many on the left today: If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?

Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cost-free hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.

Like A Hammer is an anthology of poems that unearths the shared traumas produced by America’s incarceration system.

These powerful poems of witness seek to address the oppressive systems that make up the US prison-industrial complex, revealing cracks in a criminal punishment system that too often appears unchangeable. The impacts of that system reverberate through lives and across generations. The poets gathered here aim to foreground the real experiences of people touched by the system, to upend dominant narratives, shine light on injustice, and act as a fulcrum around which to organize communities in support of change.

Like A Hammer explores how art and imagination can serve as vehicles for endurance, offering us the hope to envision a better future.

Contributors include: Hanif Abdurraqib, Rhionna Anderson, Brian Batchelor, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Marina Bueno, Cody Bruce, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Natalie Diaz, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Nikky Finney, Kennedy A. Gisege, Gustavo Guerra, Jessica Hill, Vicki Hicks, Randall Horton, Sandra Jackson, Catherine LaFleur, Ada Limón, Sarah Lynn Maatsch, Christopher Malec, Eduardo Martinez, John Murillo, Angel Nafis, Kenneth Nadeau, Leeann Parker, James Pearl, Christina Pernini, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Patrick Rosal, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, Sin á Tes Souhaits, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Erica "Ewok" Walker, Candace Williams, and SHE>i

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

From a star of the climate justice movement, a fresh, radical perspective for real climate action and “an indispensable toolkit for a new generation of activists” (Naomi Klein). 

For too long, representations of climate action in the mainstream media have been white-washed, green-washed and diluted to be made compatible with capitalism. In It’s Not That Radical, Loach addresses head-on the issues at the root of the climate crisis.

As Loach shows, we are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality, and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues.

Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering a practical and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.

From Mariame Kaba, New York Times-bestselling author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, and social worker Jane Ball comes a powerful book showing the harm that prisons cause and exploring alternatives, gorgeously illustrated by Olly Costello.

Prisons, they do no good.
They do not help. 
They do not teach.

On a moonlit road, tucked away from prying eyes, a child sees a prison complex—cinder blocks, watch towers, barbed wire. Page by page, we come to see the prison as a child sees it. 

Prisons hurt people and leave them lonely, without loved ones to comfort them or lend a listening ear.

As dandelion stars float up in the air, this dreamscape becomes a hope-scape, where love transcends the prison walls. All the families and friends of the people in the prison march and protest in beautiful song, march together to a new way and a new dawn—in this case a cooperative housing and community center, next to a neighborhood greenhouse for restoration and healing. A new world, where connection and repair are fundamental, and even tangible, as people around a table quilt messages, “I hear you. I’m sorry for what I did. How can I make it better?”

In Prisons Must Fall, Mariame Kaba, a longtime activist, together with co-author Jane Ball, present solutions that do not involve incarceration, such as meeting people’s basic needs, restorative justice, and community support—seeds for a safe world. Illustrator Olly Costello provides textured images of a global majority community and a grey, monotone backdrop that is overtaken by joyful colors. A gentle but effective addition to all social justice bookshelves and libraries. Discussion questions included.

Perfect for:

• Parents, teachers, and librarians looking for books on the prison industrial complex and prison reform
• Kids who are interested in fairness and social justice
• Readers who love exceptional and sophisticated illustration

In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You

The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders.

While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City's busiest highway.

As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we're introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.

A provocative history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance, pulling skeletons from the corporate closet to decode the political messages hidden in all of your favorite childhood movies.

In The Extended Universe, Vicky Osterweil takes us on a quest to discover how Disney’s “imagineers” have made it impossible to reflect on the wonders of growing up without thinking of Disney's movies, amusement parks, and merchandising. Drawing on extensive interviews with filmmakers, screenwriters, union organizers, and Disney “adults” alike, Osterweil unearths reactionary political commitments and maleficent legal maneuvers so cartoonishly evil they would make one of Walt's own animated villains blush.

Along the way, Osterweil braids together corporate skullduggery with a not entirely unsympathetic analysis of some of Disney's most famous movies. The result is an entertaining and convincing case that Disney's entire business model has been built upon a ruthless and fanatical insistence on intellectual property rights—from Steamboat Willie to Infinity Wars and beyond!

A vital anthology exploring the intersections between caregiving and abolition

Abolition has never been a proposal to simply tear things down. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What if abolition is something that grows?” As we struggle to build a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future, we have much to learn from the work of birthing, raising, caring for, and loving future generations.

In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

Contributors include:
Beth Richie
Harsha Walia
EJ, 6 years old
Dorothy Roberts
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Dylan Rodríguez
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn
Shira Hassan
Victoria Law
Mariame Kaba
The PDX Childcare Collective
adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown
and more

Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent drives millions into debt, despair, and onto the streets. The social cost of rent is too damn high. Written for anyone fed up with the permanent housing crisis, complicit politicians, and real estate greed, Abolish Rent dissects our housing system from the perspective of those it immiserates. Through unsparing analysis and striking stories of resistance, it shows us how tenants can, through organizing and collective action, harness our power and win the housing we deserve.

From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line. These are the seeds of the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.

A visual & lyrical declaration filled with fever & flight, REPRISE, Golden's second collection of poetry & photography maps a personal search for safety in a U.S. that offers none.

Golden’s collection illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic. These sonically playful poems and assertive, color-saturated portraits reveal a stark vulnerability that invites readers to look deeply at times of great and, possibly, liberatory uncertainty.

At its heart, this collection asks: Where is home? Who is free? What makes a nation?

Golden seeks portals towards self-liberation. In their pursuit, we’re invited to witness and learn from their interior revolution, from which they emerge more free to declare themselves in small and large ways: Whether stating I just want to wear my orange dress to the tennis courts & come back home unbothered or I am home in the arms of the armed. 

Building on their debut collection, A Dead Name That Learned How to Live and their award-winning self-portraiture series, On Learning How to Live, Golden honors the living siege & sorrow, rage & revival, joy & creation of being Black and trans in America.

An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?"

A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice.

After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take.

Contributors: Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O'Brien, and Addison Vawters.

A collection of interviews with some of the world’s leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe.

As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient. The interviewees connect the struggle for Palestinian liberation to various liberatory movements around the world, simultaneously interrogating and recontextualizing their own positions given the ongoing aggression in Palestine. This incredible group includes Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Nadine El-Enany, Gabor Mate, Mustafa Barghouti, Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Gilroy, Elias Khoury, Gayatri Spivak, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

Palestine in a World on Fire highlights the centrality of Palestine in struggles shared across the world: capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, neo-colonialism, racism, and more. Each conversation tackles urgent events and unfolding dynamics, and the scholar-activists interviewed here provide invaluable perspectives and insights, illuminating the richness and relevance of recent scholarship on Palestine.

A damning account of the latest transformation in mass incarceration, revealing how powerful nonprofits and so-called progressives used the language of social movements to build new jails.

In 2019, after unyielding pressure from activists, New York City seemed poised to close the detested Rikers Island penal colony. The local press dutifully reported that the end of Rikers was imminent, and New Yorkers celebrated the closure of the country’s largest urban jail, condemned as a moral stain on an otherwise great city. The problem, however, was that the city had not actually committed to closing Rikers. And at the same time, it laid the groundwork for the construction of more jails, a network of skyscraper facilities amounting to the largest carceral construction the city has seen in decades.

How did this happen?

In Skyscraper Jails, scholars and organizersJarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti detail how progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane" jails. The principal advocates of these new jails were not right-wing politicians, but prominent city activists and progressive non-profit organizations.

As the political coalition that campaigned for the new jails fans out across the United States, the story at the heart of Skyscraper Jails is at once a case study and a cautionary tale for what will be coming to cities and towns across the United States and beyond.

In the face of relentless attacks on antiracist education, a much-needed reckoning with the roots of this latest wave of censorship and an urgent call to action to defend education.

In just the last few years, scores of states have introduced or passed legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about structural racism and other forms of oppression. Books have been cut from curricula and pulled from school library shelves. Teachers have been fired and threatened with discipline.

As long-time organizer, writer, and high school teacher Jesse Hagopian argues in Teach Truth, at stake is our democracy, not to mention the annihilation of entire systems of knowledge that challenge the status quo. As Hagopian shows by exploring the origins, philosophy, and manifestations of these attacks, the Right’s effort to regulate knowledge is an attempt to maintain its power over the American capitalist system, now and into the future.

Yet the struggle for a liberatory education has a long history in the United States, from the days when it was illegal for Black people to be literate, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to Black Lives Matter at School today. Teachers, students, and their allies are already building a movement – in the classroom, on campus, and in the streets – to defend antiracist education.

A vital history of organizing within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons in the 1970s, illuminating a crucial chapter in today’s abolition feminist struggles.

This new edition of an award-winning book features a foreword from acclaimed scholar-activist Sarah Haley and an afterword by Thuma.

During the 1970s, grassroots activists within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Scholar-activist Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, imprisoned and institutionalized people’s rights, and gender and sexual liberation. All Our Trials chronicles the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive research, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, coalition organizing, and activist publications that cut through prison walls. In the process, All Our Trials reveals a vibrant culture of opposition to interpersonal and state violence that both transforms our understanding of 1970s social movements and illuminates the history of present struggles for transformative justice.

Winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Studies

Shortlisted for the Organization of American Historians’ Nickliss Prize and the American Studies Association’s Romero Prize

Part photo book, part memoir, part oral history project, this volume paints a vivid portrait of queer and trans experiences in rural areas and small towns across the US.

In 2013, Rae Garringer embarked on the Country Queers oral history project with a borrowed audio recorder, a flip phone, and a paper atlas in a Subaru Forester with over 160,000 miles on it. Raised on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, they were motivated by an intense frustration with the lack of rural queer stories and the isolation that comes with that absence. “Queers, in all our forms, have always existed,” Garringer writes, “all across this continent since before it was colonized.”

After years as a DIY, minimally funded, community-based oral history project, the work now takes a new form in Country Queers: A Love Story—a book of full-color photos and interviews with rural folks from Mississippi to New Mexico and beyond, with Garringer’s account as traveler and interviewer woven through the pages. In these intimate conversations, we see how queerness—shaped, as all things are, by race, class, gender, and more—moves in rural and small-town spaces, spotlighting how country queers make sense of their lives through reflections on land, home, community, and belonging. While media-driven myths suggest that big cities are the only places queer folks can find love and community, Country Queers resists that trope by centering rural queer and trans stories of the joys, challenges, monotony, and nuances of their lives, in their own words.

In his retelling of the boldness and tragedy of the Zhina uprising in Iran, Hamid Dabashi asks: What constitutes the success of revolutions and how do we measure their failures?

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, was killed in police custody for failing to observe the strict dress code imposed on Iranian women. Her death sparked a massive social uprising within and outside of Iran. The slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” spread like wildfire from Amini’s hometown to solidarity protests held in London, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Seoul and beyond. The pain felt by millions of Iranians, caused by the Islamic Republic, was on the global stage again.

Yet, misreadings of the Zhina uprising—both accidental and insidious—began to proliferate, with different parties vying for power. Iran in Revolt by author and scholar Hamid Dabashi cuts through the white noise of imperialist war mongers and social media bots to provide a careful and principled account of the revolution, and how it has forever altered the nature of politics in Iran and the wider region.

Iran in Revolt argues that “democracy” and the “nation-state” are tired concepts, exploring what it means to fight for a just society instead. Through detailed political, philosophical, and historical analysis, Dabashi shows that the vulnerable lives and fragile liberties of nations have never been so intimately connected, just as the pernicious cruelties of ruling regimes have never been so identical as they are today.

For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises—was always a central part of his urban geography.
In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make—that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city.
Dead Cities, written over twenty years ago, abounds with prophecies fulfilled, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken.

From the author of Abolish the Family, an unflinching tour of two hundred years of enemy feminisms, making the case instead for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we need.

In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.

Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.

At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.

A debut collection of lyric poems interrogating the generational implications of the Great Migration to Northern California. 
Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, a debut collection by E. Hughes, marries personal narrative with historical excavation to articulate the intricacies of Black familial love, life, and pain. Tracing the experiences of a southern Black family, their migration to the San Francisco Bay area, and the persistent anti-Blackness there (despite the state’s insistence that it is/was not involved in the US’ projects of imperialism or chattel slavery), Hughes illuminates the intersections of history, grief, and violence.
At the book’s heart is “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant,” a persona poem written from the perspective of the formerly enslaved abolitionist and financier Mary Ellen Pleasant who is thought to have helped fund John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Alongside this historical account, Hughes deftly weaves in the story of a contemporary Black family navigating the generational trauma resulting from the Great Migration: domestic violence and racialized violence, familial love and loyalty, the work of parenting, and the work of being a child. Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water reveals in its pages that, while many things have changed over time, ultimately the question of what “freedom” meant and looked like for Black people in the early 20th century retains the same murkiness and contradictions for Black people today. 

Thirty years after its original publication, this newly imagined edition brings the work and musings of fifteen Black literary luminaries in conversation with a new generation of writers and readers.

The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Barbara Neely, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world, including Donika Kelly, Safiya Sinclair, Diamond Sharp, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, among others. This new edition also includes an introductory poem by Morgan Parker, a foreword by Salamishah Tillet, and a new author’s note. The new contributors carry the torch of the original interviewees’ lives and words with heart, rigor, gratitude, and radical imagination, illuminating how these conversations are about more than just writing—they are about life, relationships, joy, gratitude, wellness, and self-preservation.

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.

Tracing the narratives of five incarcerated individuals, Corridors of Contagion speaks to the devastating impact of surviving the pandemic inside prison walls. 

Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the onset of the pandemic—and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system: failures that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to solitary confinement, from insufficient healthcare to life sentences.

The book portrays the horrors of continual lockdowns not in the comfort of one’s own home, but in prisons where routine violence and chaos is made even more unimaginable by the complete lack of control over protection from a terrifying and lethal new virus. The pandemic provided an opportunity for lawmakers and policy makers to rethink the nation’s addiction to perpetual punishment. Instead, US jails and prisons doubled down on punishment under the guise of pandemic protections. As a result, people behind bars experienced increased stress, mental health challenges, increased violence, and higher rates of deaths, many of which could have been prevented.

While the pandemic emergency has been declared over, we are continuing to learn more about the extent of its destruction. Corridors of Contagion reminds readers about both the particular horrors experienced by people in cages and the continued role of the US as the world’s prison nation. 

A sweeping yet penetrating collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, exploring the most pressing global concerns of our time.

In these illuminating interviews conductedby C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky yet again shares his brilliant insights on an array of struggles and challenges facing humanity. A Livable Future Is Possible addresses artificial intelligence and the potential for such programs to surpass humans in cognitive awareness; what lies ahead for a world engulfed in a deadly climate crisis; the rise of neo-fascism internationally, and why we should organize across borders to confront it; the striking similarities between Trump and Biden's foreign policies; and a number of other critical issues gripping the planet.

Noam Chomsky has been an incomparable model of moral clarity and intellectual courage during his many decades as a scholar and critic. He is the most cited living scholar. One would be hard-pressed to find a more influential voice than Chomsky’s in the West. A Livable Future Is Possible is not only an urgent and informative resource, it is a call-to-action for those hoping to help carry the torch of one of history’s greatest minds.

An intimate, inspiring memoir by educator and labor union leader Karen Lewis, a formidable fighter, a staunch defender of teachers and students, and a beloved Chicagoan.

In 2012, Karen Lewis led the Chicago Teachers Union to a historic strike, challenging the city’s powerful mayor and paving the way for an unprecedented wave of teacher strikes in the decade that followed. 

But Lewis’s life took her in rich and surprising directions long before she landed in the CTU President’s office. I Didn’t Come Here to Lie, written in collaboration with historian and education expert Elizabeth Todd-Breland, tells Lewis’s story in full for the first time, capturing her lively wit, her charisma, and her commitment to building the schools and communities teachers, students, and families deserve.

From her childhood on Chicago’s South Side to her teen years organizing Black Power walkouts, from her education at Mount Holyoke and Dartmouth to her years in Oklahoma and Barbados and her stints in medical school and film school, readers follow Lewis through a life full of exploration. Wherever she was, she maintained a strong commitment to building fairness. She found her calling in the classroom, teaching science for more than twenty years before becoming a union leader in Chicago.

Up until her untimely death from brain cancer in 2021, Karen Lewis was spirited, unshakeable, and fierce. She remains a model for current organizers and teachers doing the day-to-day work of building a better world. I Didn’t Come Here to Lie is a testament to one of the true revolutionaries of her generation.

This striking collection of more than 200 full-color infographics is a vivid portrait of Israeli settler colonialism and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

As a new generation of movement-builders seek to understand Israel’s brutal, illegal occupation of Palestine, Visualizing Impact’s vivid and informative graphics reveal deep truths about the decades-long Palestinian struggle for freedom.

The infographics present more than just data: colorful, accessible, and thoughtfully arranged, the oppression they document in stark detail dovetails with stories of perseverance and strength. From the history of Zionist settlement to the depopulation of Palestinian villages; from the construction of an apartheid wall to the destruction of olive trees; from hunger strikes to mass protests to boycotts, Visualizing Palestine’s graphics are powerful, comprehensive, and demand our attention.

Even the River Starts Small is a collection of stories from the movement to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota.

The collection features anonymous writing, art, and photos spanning nearly a decade, and includes reflections on many of the diverse experiences that made up this grassroots resistance. There are hundreds of individual pieces of writing and visual art in the collection published in full color.
Line 3 is a tar sands oil pipeline that threatens communities, land, and water along its route, as well as the future of our climate. In 2021, despite fierce resistance, Enbridge completed construction of Line 3. Anishinaabe water protectors led the fight, asserting their sovereignty to oppose construction of this extractive project through their lands. For the better part of a decade thousands of people in Minnesota and around turtle island joined together to try and stop construction with a wide range of tactics.
After construction of the pipeline was complete, a group of young volunteer organizers from the movement set out to gather stories from the resistance to create a book that could be given to the movement as a gift. That team originally published Even the River Starts Small, the result of that project, in a limited distribution and gave away copies for free to people who were involved in resisting construction of Line 3. The book is now available for all through Haymarket Books.

The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This pathbreaking volume exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence.
In the name of “smart” borders, the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorize and control human beings and their movement.
These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence shed light on this new threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it.
The organizers, journalists, and scholars in these pages are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.

One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022
PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020
One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020
Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019
Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019

Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto. 
Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world.
In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water Is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.
While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family’s rich history of struggle.

As the rivalry between the US and China enters a dangerous new phase, reaffirming the politics of anti-imperialism is a task more important than ever.
From trade wars and pandemic politics to rioting workers, intercontinental balloons, and battles over TikTok, the US media tends to present contemporary China—when it’s discussed at all—in sensationalist terms. This portrayal has only intensified as China’s relationship with the United States has grown increasingly hostile. Whether in the form of overtly racist rhetoric and aggressive trade actions, or the more buttoned down but equally antagonistic efforts to oppose Chinese interests abroad, the US has made clear that it has no interest in giving up its position as global hegemon. This seemingly endless cycle of nationalism, jingoism, and reactionary politics on both sides of the Pacific suggests a downward spiral that could plausibly result in catastrophic military confrontation.
Against Imperialism forcefully makes the case that workers and socially marginalized people in both the US and China must oppose our rulers’ claims that they have our best interests in mind as they ratchet up their rivalry. Rather, if we’re to avert nuclear calamity, we must oppose imperialism in all its forms, and regardless of its source and rhetoric.
Through snapshots of China’s growing social movements—from its labor struggles to feminist campaigns, and more—Lin, Liu, Friedman, and Smith provide some of the building blocks we’ll need to construct a movement that centers international solidarity across borders.

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism. 
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger.
The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.

From the critically acclaimed author of HoodWitch, Faylita Hicks’s second collection explores the question, Where do our desires take us?
An offspring of Audre Lorde’s seminal essay “Uses of the Erotic,” Hicks’s A Map of My Want follows a nonbinary femme as they explore the sensual intersection of the personal and the political, a crossroads to which their sexual liberation brought them after their escape from a religious cult. Lyrically, Hicks interprets the US Declaration of Independence's infamous “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for themselves. Combining storytelling with Western astrology, this poetry collection is an intimate erotic spell through which Hicks conjures joy as they develop an alternate theory on how to attain happiness—through ecstatic healing.

A critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work in academia and within impacted communities.

Within social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and radical praxis are shifting the field. Critical scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of carceral social work as a form of “soft policing.” For radical social work, abolition moves beyond critique to the politics of possibility.

Featuring a foreword by Mariame Kaba, Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of abolition, transformative justice, and collective care.

“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I am going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.
In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.
Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

A collection of illuminating interviews with leading abolitionist organizers and thinkers, reflecting on the uprisings of summer 2020, the rise of #defund, and the work ahead of bridging the divide between reform and abolition. 
The 2020 uprisings against police violence launched a nation conversation about defunding the police and prisons, propelling the #defund movement into the spotlight. The backlash has been swift, beating back efforts to reallocate public funds away from police and other punitive carceral systems and into social welfare programs that provide care, stability, and community. 
But as Calvin John Smiley reveals through pointed conversations with academics, activists, and system-impacted individuals, #defund was always more than a brief moment; it is part of an ongoing struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, police state-sanctioned violence, and mass incarceration.
Through interviews with Marisol LeBrón, Dan Berger, Zellie Imani, and Olayemi Olurin, among others, Smiley considers how #defund can bridge the divide between reform and abolition, becoming a catalyst to help organizers realize abolitionist visions. Along the way, these rich conversations illuminate the long histories of systems of repression and protests against them; how policing serves as a colonial project in Puerto Rico and beyond; why creativity and music-making are essential to movement-building; and much more. 
Giving voice to those committed to abolitionist praxis, Defund is an essential tool for organizers as we imagine how defund goes from a hashtag to a movement to a reality. 

A beautiful anthology featuring some of the brightest voices in contemporary American poetry who challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label “Asian American and Pacific Islander” in today’s world.

In this thoughtfully curated, intergenerational collection, poets of multiple languages, lands, and waters write against and through the contested terrain of AAPI identity. Too often, Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans are squeezed into the same story. The poets gathered here, and the lineages they represent, exceed this sameness. May this anthology uplift complexities and incite transformation and joy.

Contributors include Marilyn Chin, Joshua Nguyen, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask, and many more writers, both established and emerging.

From the organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature, this anthology of essays connects Palestinian resistance with global freedom struggles against settler colonialism and calls on us to think more concretely about the practice of solidarity.
The Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, was created in 2008 as “a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for combating colonialism in the 21st century.” The annual festival brings authors from around the world to convene with readers, artists, writers, and activists in cities across Palestine for cross-pollination of radical art, ideas, and literature.
These efforts resulted in Beyond Frontiers, an anthology thoughtfully arranged and introduced by PalFest cocurator Mahdi Sabbagh. Contributors include writers and scholars such as Tareq Baconi and Dina Omar, architect Mabel O. Wilson, and filmmaker Omar Robert Hamilton, among others, each bringing their diverse intellectual and geographic backgrounds to the forefront. Each piece grapples with the questions: How do we confront the need to take inevitable and often difficult political stances? How do we make sense of the destruction, uprooting, and pain that we witness? And given our seemingly impossible reality, how is mutuality constructed?

An incisive, lyrical, and deeply reported account of India’s descent into authoritarianism.
Traveling across India, interviewing Hindu zealots, armed insurgents, jailed dissidents, and politicians and thinkers from across the political spectrum, Siddhartha Deb reveals a country in which forces old and new have aligned to endanger democracy. The result is an absorbing—and disturbing—portrait. India has become a religious fundamentalist dystopia, one depicted here with a novelist’s precise language and eye for detail.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party—a formation explicitly drawing on European fascism—has deftly exploited modern technologies, the media, and market forces to launch a relentless campaign on minorities, women, dissenters, and the poor. Deb profiles these people, as well as those fighting back, including writers, scholars, and journalists. Twilight Prisoners sounds the alarm now that the world’s largest democracy is under threat in ways that echo the fissures in the United States, United Kingdom, and so-called democracies the world over.

An eye-opening account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, showing how the strike—and the violent backlash that ensued—reveal the genesis of modern policing.
In the early years of the twentieth century, in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, nearly 150,000 miners took part in one of the most critical events in the history of US labor organizing. The brutal response by the state of Pennsylvania—as well as the federal government—inaugurated the structure and power of policing that we know today.
In this gripping account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, scholar and activist David Correia takes readers through the story of the United Mine Workers of America, their struggle against systems of private policing—which were present in practically every industry in the US—and the development of public, professionalized, state-sanctioned, and state-serving police.
The demands of their strike included shorter work days, higher wages, and safer conditions in the deadly mines. However, their labor was crucial to westward expansion, colonial occupations in the Caribbean and the Philippines, and many burgeoning industries in the US. To keep the fires of capitalism burning, industrialists prodded state and federal governments to intervene. Together, they established the first uniformed police force of its kind—a model soon emulated in other states.

Appalachia has been a place of movement and migration—for individuals, families, and entire communities—for centuries.
Beginning Again brings together twelve narratives of refugees, migrants, and generations-long residents that explore complex journeys of resettlement. In their stories, Appalachia—despite how it’s popularly portrayed—is not simply a region of poverty and strife populated only by white people. It is a diverse place where belonging and connection are created despite displacement, resource extraction, and inequality. 

Among the narratives included:

Hear from Claudine Katete, a Rwandan asylum seeker raised in refugee camps who graduated college into the chaos of COVID-19. Follow Amal as she and her family fled war-ravaged Syria and navigated mice-infested housing and unresponsive case workers. Listen to Mekyah Davis, born and raised in Big Stone Gap, as he describes the “slow burn” of everyday racism and his efforts to organize Black Appalachian youth to stay in their communities. Taken together, their stories and more collected here present a nuanced look at life in contemporary Appalachia.

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.
Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.
Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.

A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part?

Against enormous odds and in the face of fierce pushback, the Palestine solidarity movement has succeeded in transforming the landscape of American politics. The movement has catapulted Palestine from being an untouchable topic in even liberal political circles to a central rallying cry in grassroots progressive organizing, one that is championed by some of the highest profile and beloved members of Congress.

In the fall and winter of 2023, with the attention of the world focused on Israel’s unprecedented aggression against the people of Gaza, millions across the globe mobilized in solidarity with Palestinians and their struggle for liberation. Jewish progressives in the US played a highly visible role in denouncing Israel’s actions and US complicity in them: leading mobilizations and disruptions from the US Capitol to Grand Central Station.

In this book, two key leaders and former staff of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) —Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise—focus on the important role of anti-Zionist Jewish organizing within the broader Palestine solidarity movement, reflecting on their decade of leadership of JVP and drawing lessons especially relevant to those organizing from a position of solidarity.

Against the backdrop of rapid and often devastating political developments, they explore how JVP grew larger as the organization shifted to the left and helped to alter the public narrative about Palestinian liberation, while also navigating the tensions of organization-building and creating a space for Judaism liberated from Zionism. Their insights help contextualize the intense suppression of activism for Palestinian freedom, while illuminating the roots of today’s flourishing Jewish solidarity with Palestinians worldwide.

In addressing their shortcomings and failures no less than their inspiring successes, Vilkomerson and Wise deliver an account of JVP’s organizing during the 2010s that offers crucial strategic lessons for anyone engaging in the collective work of building organizations and fighting for justice as our movements evolve over time.

An incisive guide to abolitionist strategy, and a love letter to the movement that made this moment possible.

Critics of abolition sometimes castigate the movement for its utopianism, but in How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.
Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics. Readers sit in on the Winnipeg rideshares of Bar None and the meetings of the Chicago Community Bail Fund as they assess the utility of politicized mutual aid. They follow the campaigns and coalitions of Critical Resistance in Oakland and San Francisco and Survived and Punished in New York City, and learn about the prisoner correspondence projects that keep activists behind bars and outside them in constant coordination.
Abolitionist campaigns are constructing on-the-ground initiatives across North America to deconstruct carceral society and build resistant communities.Through the words, deeds, and personalities of this beautifully peopled movement, How to Abolish Prisons emerges as a stunning snapshot of a movement’s thinking in motion.

Economist Rob Larson combines wit, righteous anger, and clear-eyed analysis as he dissects the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the disgustingly wealthy.

The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world is becoming common knowledge. And while lists of “richest people in x country” may be easy to come by, how much do we really know about the billionaires who sit atop our global economic system? Who are they, really? How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains? And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions?

Turning their own weapons of class-war against them—from the fawning profiles found in the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal to the national income data buried in white papers meant solely for investors and technocrats—Larson crunches the numbers so you don’t have to.  But he doesn’t stop there, because appreciating the sheer scale of the global wealth gap doesn’t even touch on all the ways the ruling class are making us miserable, breaking our society to pieces, and destroying the planet in their pursuit of ever-increasing power and profit. As we behold whole continents on fire, pandemics thrashing public health systems to smithereens, and declining lifespans for the vast majority, Larson argues that the only way forward is to yank on the emergency break and give capitalism the boot.

Aim High, Little Giant, Aim High! is a story about Taína, a nine-year-old Afro Boricua basketball player growing up in Brooklyn during a pandemic who learns valuable life lessons from family, friends, and the community, both on and off the court.

"Peeeace!" That’s how Taina opens this book, and that’s how we get a tour of Brooklyn: through Taina’s eyes! There’s the biddy court where Papa is doing a b-ball clinic, and where Taina is joined by friends Theophilus, Ireyna, Mamushi and Ibrahim. Then there are the legendary parks of Brooklyn—Bed Stuy to Brownsville to Tillary Park—and all the legendary players, the folklore of NYC playground basketball culture. At home and on the court, Taina learns math and stories through the city and basketball.

"Pa’lante, siempre pa’lante!" Mama says this is what the Young Lords Party used to shout for social justice. Taina’s mother says it means "forward, always forward!" and that’s where Taina is going, forward in life!

Aim High, Little Giant, Aim High! features:

A meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color.

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia.  Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.

García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.

A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans.

Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals."

One essayist and grocery store worker describes what it is like to be an “essential worker” during the pandemic; another reporter and military veteran details his experience with homelessness and what would have actually helped him at the time. These dozens of fierce and sometimes darkly funny pieces reflect the larger systems that have made writers' bodily experiences, family and home lives, and work far harder than they ought to be.

Featuring introductions by luminaries including Michelle Tea, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Astra Taylor, Going for Broke is revelatory. It shows us the costs of income inequality to our bodies and our minds—and demonstrates real ways to change our conditions.

Noam Chomsky dissects the multiple crises facing humankind and the planet; and provides a road map for resistance.

In this completely original set of interviews between the legendary duo of Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, the two confront topics such as the pandemic, the wealth gap (made worse because of the pandemic), climate destruction, the increasing power of the corporate owned media, systematic racism,  Big Tech, and more. 

Noam Chomsky is one of the most cited scholars in human history. He ranks right up there with Aristotle and Marx, and this book reaffirms his esteemed reputation. Notes on Resistance will inspire all those struggling for human liberation.

A book of stunning black and white photographs, capturing the events, people, and landscape of Chicago’s Washington Park during the summer of 1987. 

Located in Chicago’s South side and designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Washington Park takes its name from the first president of the United States. But in 1987, for at least one joyous summer, the community claimed it as their own—even renamed it Harold Washington Park—as depicted in this vibrant collection of work by Chicagoan and photographer, Rose Blouin. The resulting images represent a profile of Chicago’s Black community in a place where they come together for recreation, festivals, sports, community events, parades, weddings, and other arts and cultural events.

These photographs brim with the delights of summer: a verdant natural world, food, fun, music, family gatherings, and a community inhabiting the vast expanse of the Chicago park.They embody the diversity, strength, and humanity of the people for whom Washington Park is a summertime gathering place. To Washington Park, With Love includes forewords by Eve L. Ewing and Adrienne Brown, contextualizing and celebrating the 140 black and white photographs from Blouin’s indispensable body of work.

Take a wild ride with the carbon atom through a history of Earth’s climate, from dinosaurs to wooly mammoths to today’s climate crisis.

The Everywhere Atom blends science, humor, and cartoon atoms to explain how the carbon cycle affects the climate, today and throughout Earth's history. The carbon atom is the most basic building block on Earth and its movement around the planet shapes the climate. While the carbon cycle is central to understanding climate change, it is often missing from children’s climate books, making this a critical addition to classrooms and libraries.

This engaging guide uses creatures that kids love, like dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, as an entry point for understanding the carbon cycle. Kids will journey from Earth’s early fiery days to Ice Ages to the modern fossil fuel era. While addressing the climate crisis, the book ends with a message of hope: humans are powerful in numbers and, through collective action, can affect the whole world, just like the carbon atom.

Balancing the heaviness of the climate crisis with dynamic illustrations and humor, the book’s cartoon carbon atoms are designed to engage younger audiences (readers from ages 5-9) and bring some comic relief to the subject, driving home a central point: carbon is not bad per se, it is how humans affect the movement of carbon that can make it so powerful and damaging—which also means the climate crisis can be reversed.

A meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color.

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia.  Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.

García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.

New York Times Bestseller

“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.”

What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.

With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”