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Join David Omotoso Stovall and Tara Betts as they discuss Stovall's latest book Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago. 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. -------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: David Omotoso Stovall is a professor in the Department of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation and the Politics of Interruption. Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and Arc & Hue. She is a professor in the Peace, Conflict Studies, and Social Justice program at DePaul University and part of the faculty at the Solstice MFA program at Lasell University. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including This is the Honey, Choice Words, and The Overturning. Her short stories and essays have also appeared in numerous publications, including Octavia's Brood, Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, and The Breakbeat Poets.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZttfgSzf46IBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join us for a conversation with local organizers about how our community pushed back against attacks on our neighbors from federal border patrol agents last fall. Over the course of several months, more than 250 Border Patrol agents were flown into Illinois to assist ICE in carrying out warrantless arrests and racially targeted sweeps. Community organizations documented at least 615 people who were unlawfully detained — a number expected to grow as additional cases are reviewed. Although this particular surge force has since left Illinois, federal officials have made it clear that similar operations are likely to return. That makes it essential to take stock of what happened here, how our communities responded in real time, and what it means for the months ahead. Speakers include Rey Wences from Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Antonio Gutierrez from Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) and Illinois State Senator Celina Villanueva, with a special poetry reading from Juliet DeJesus Alejandre. This event is cosponsored by ICIRR, OCAD and Haymarket Books.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/OJ4Kk4yARb4Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
The US military build up in the Caribbean and its aggression towards Venezuela are part of the Trump regime’s strategy of renewed American dominance and interventionism in the Western Hemisphere. Join Center for Political Education, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, and Haymarket Books for an important conversation on the new “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and how US imperialism threatens to bring war and economic instability across the region. Speakers: Marisol LeBrón is an Associate Professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching focus on social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021). Jorge E. Cuéllar is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on the histories, politics, and daily life of modern Central America. At present, he is finishing his first book titled, Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador (Duke UP), a grounded study of the Central American nation's postwar to "post-postwar" transition. Cuéllar is appointed Assistant Professor of Central American Studies in the Department of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College and is a member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Editorial Committee. Alex Aviña is Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University (ASU). His research focuses on twentieth-century Mexico, with an emphasis on revolutionary movements, the Mexican Left, state violence and terrorism, immigration, and the history of narcotics production and trafficking. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School, and Center for Political Education. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/GehPn9o3_cQBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
As the new year begins, the student movement for Palestine is facing its first felony trial for a 2024 demonstration at Stanford University. If convicted of the felonies brought against them, the Stanford 11 face the possibility of over three years in prison and over $300,000 in restitution to Stanford University. On January 9, 2026, opening arguments commenced, marking the beginning of a lengthy trial anticipated to last between two to six weeks.In recent years we have witnessed the criminalization of dissent ramp up nationwide, threatening both students and everyday people with detention, deportation, and political prosecutions. The chilling effect on our movements has been palpable, raising questions about what it means to act and sacrifice for our principles today. Amidst heightened repression, the US government's increasing impunity at home and abroad, and the genocide in Gaza still unabated by a 'ceasefire'—how can we continue to act in solidarity and defend our movement?Speakers:Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian student organizer and Columbia graduate student who was abducted from his home and from his then 8-month pregnant wife by ICE agents in March 2025. He spent three months in immigration detention, continuing to speak out from behind bars for Palestine as well as others held alongside him in ICE custody. A judge ordered his release in June 2025. However, Mahmoud's case remains pending: the federal government immediately appealed the decision, and is still fighting to deport him. Since his release, Mahmoud has filed a lawsuit demanding the Trump administration release its communications with the Zionist groups that contributed to his arrest, detention, and attempted deportation.Germán González is an organizer with Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a fourth year student at Stanford University, and a defendant with the Stanford 11. They are completing a degree in Urban Studies, with hopes of working in local government and continuing his revolutionary organizing.Hatem Bazian is a longtime Palestinian community activist and academic. He is the co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the first accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States. Professor Bazian is a lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. For decades, his leadership and community work have helped nurture and build up the national solidarity movement for Palestine: Professor Bazian was also a founding member of the first Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at UC Berkeley, and he continues to lend his support and guidance as the movement grows.Loubna Qutami is a Palestinian community organizer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.Tori Porell is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. She provides legal advice and advocacy support to activists in the movement for Palestinian liberation on issues ranging from free speech violations, discrimination and disciplinary charges to doxxing, threats, and academic freedom.This event is organized by Haymarket Books, Stanford 11 Defense Committee, Palestine Legal, Palestinian Youth Movement, Palestinian Feminist Collective, and Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine.
How do we understand the new authoritarianism that has emerged in the context of global instabilities, trade wars, imperial rivalries, and political polarization? Is neoliberalism being replaced by authoritarianism or welded to it? Join Clara Mattei and David McNally for a discussion of these issues explored in the new issue of Spectre Journal. Speakers: Clara E. Mattei is Professor of Economics at The University of Tulsa and the President of FREE: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. She is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. David McNally is the author of Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. An editor of Spectre journal, he teaches history in Houston where he also directs the Project on Race and Capitalism. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/PTS-cJ37SWcBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Daniella Toosie-Watson, E. Hughes, and Hanif Abdurraqib for a launch and celebration of Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection, What We Do With God. Daniella 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. What We Do with God dives into the grotesque, the bestial, the surreal, as a means to defamiliarize abuse; it’s 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. “Do not mistake the whimsy and irreverence blooming through this collection as a lack of gravity–it is quite the opposite. These poems reinforce how brutally essential a playful imagination is to reckon with a deadly world where faith and grace are hard-earned. Toosie-Watson has compiled a glorious collection burning bright with a wild wit and an even more ferocious wisdom.” Tarfia Faizullah Speakers: Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) is a writer, visual artist, and the author of What We Do with God (Haymarket Books, 2025). She has been published in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Oxford Poetry, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize Shortlist, the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and a Graduate Hopwood Award & Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received her MFA in poetry. Daniella lives in New York. E. Hughes is the author of Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and the Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. Currently, Hughes is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Emory University in Continental Philosophy. Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in the FADER, Pitchfork, New Yorker, and New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/towhupw2ddABuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
For more than two decades, the movement to end mass incarceration has sought to challenge policing, criminalization and incarceration as harmful institutions. Amongst the harms perpetrated by these carceral systems is the punishment paradigm, a term that signifies the hegemonic power of punishment as it now exists in the U.S., embedded in culture, media, law, and policy. Despite a heightened consciousness around the negative impacts of punitive systems following the uprisings of 2020, the institutions of punishment have remained largely intact. The Trump administration has significantly escalated the use of punishing institutions, like policing, detention, incarceration and deportation, to target migrants, dissidents, and all people at the margins. The federal government has also increased its use of punishment practices, like the threats to punish institutions for not complying with government demands, the outsourcing of punishment to everyday people, and the impunity offered for otherwise punishable offenses to those who side with the administration. This escalation has demonstrated the centrality of punishment to authoritarian regimes, and laid bare the devastating consequences for our communities. Speakers: Laura Whitehorn served 14+ years in federal prison for the “Resistance Conspiracy” case.” Released in 1999, she works in the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPPCampaign.com), and for the release of political prisoners. She edited the "The War Before" by late Black Panther political prisoner and organizer, Safiya Bukari (feministpress.org) and helped organized the 2014 Interference Archive exhibition "Self Determination Inside/Out" which showed how the struggles of incarcerated people affected and shaped social movements on the outside. With her partner, the writer Susie Day, she was part of the prison, labor, and academic delegation to Palestine in 2016. Nadia Ben-Youssef (she/her) is the granddaughter of artists, refugees, and revolutionaries. A human rights lawyer by training, Nadia currently serves as the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal and advocacy organization working with social movements and communities under threat to dismantle racism, cisheteropatriarchy, economic oppression and abusive state practices. She has expertise in international human rights fora and mechanisms, and extensive experience developing advocacy strategies to influence U.S. decision-makers. Her work often centers at the intersection of art and advocacy, and she curates exhibits and artistic programming that document key human rights concerns, celebrate social movements, and allow creatives the space to chart the future. Central to Nadia's lifework is a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and she is a proud co-founder of the Adalah Justice Project. Nadia is a member of the NY State bar, and serves on the Boards of Adalah Justice Project, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Multitude Films. Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Teen Vogue, The Nation, Truthout, Inquest, and The Forge. Charlene Allen is a writer and activist who works with community organizations to heal trauma and foster justice. She has been a restorative and healing justice practitioner for over a decade and advocates for policy changes to expand the use of community-based restorative practices. As a writer, Charlene’s debut novel, Play the Game, (HarperCollins, 2023), explores and advances restorative and healing justice practices in real life situations Cameron W. Rasmussen is a social worker, researcher, educator, and facilitator. He is an assistant professor at the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where he researches issues of accountability, violence, and justice, and the intersections of abolition and social work. Cameron is a Co-Editor of Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes and the Practice of Community Care and is a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work (NAASW). Co-Sponsors: Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, Center for Justice at Columbia University, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Haymarket Books.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/CAyIxFkh7U4Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join us for a virtual book launch of How to End Family Policing: From Outrage to Action, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that claim to protect children make them—and our communities—less safe. Based on decades of experience, organizing, and research, How to End Family Policing argues that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. In fact, rather than the misleading language of "child welfare," many scholars and activists describe these institutions as "family policing." Drawing on abolitionist principals, this much-needed intervention shows that no kinship network benefits from investigation, surveillance, policing, or forced separation. Contributors include community organizers, parents, civil rights attorneys, scholars, social workers, and survivors of family policing. Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Ritchie, and Erin Miles Cloud will discuss the historical context of the family policing system and, vitally, how organizers have strategized against it. Order a copy of How to End Family Policing here. Speakers: Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women; and of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. She co-founded Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people, and led INCITE!'s work on law enforcement violence. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub and National Black Women's Justice Institute she worked with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and secure deep investments in community-based strategies that will produce greater public safety. Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. She is a 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book, TORN APART is about how the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition can build a safer world. Erin Miles Cloud is a civil rights attorney. She is the co-founder of Movement for Family Power, co-editor of How to End Family Policing, and a former family defense public defender. She is a Black- mixed race mother of two beautiful children.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/dkkhftUco84Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Garrett Felber for the virtual release event for the long-awaited biography of Martin Sostre—the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”Get the book: https://www.akpress.org/a-continuous-struggle.htmlSpeakers:Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she served as Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014-2024. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California 2007). Recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso 2024), and a foreword to the English translation of Making the World Clean by Françoise Vergès (Goldsmiths and MIT Press 2024). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (dir. Kenton Card. 2021) features her internationalist work. Honors include the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis) and the 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize.This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and AK Press.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuu8ylfmakBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join the editors of No Cop City, No Cop World for a panel discussion on the fight for police abolition and for a livable planet for all.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. No Cop City, No Cop World 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.Order a copy of No Cop City, No Cop World here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2541-no-cop-city-no-cop-worldSpeakers:Micah Herskind is an organizer, writer, and law student who is active in abolitionist movements against police and jail expansion.Kamau Franklin (he/him) is the founder of Community Movement Builders. He’s been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years.Mariah Parker is an emcee and labor organizer born and raised in the South. Their cultural work and organizing have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, SPIN, Al Jazeera, Scalawag and Hammer & Hope.Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender-nonconforming people for the past four decades. She is cofounder of Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of more than 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender-nonconforming people. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub, she works with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and invest in strategies that will create safer communities. Ritchie is co-author, with Mariame Kaba, of No More Police. She is a nationally recognized researcher, policy analyst, and expert on policing and criminalization. Ritchie lives in Detroit, Michigan.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0RdtGIxVgkBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org