Hy Thurman: Revolutionary Hillbilly

Hy Thurman was a co-founder of the Young Patriots Organization, a group of poor white radicals who worked with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords in the Original Rainbow Coalition. This recording is from his online book release party. Including commentary from Lynn Lewis (Picture the Homeless Oral History Project), Allyn Maxfield Steele (Highlander) and Rachel Herzing (Center For Political Education).

Judith Arcana: Hello, This is Jane

Interview by Jenny Worley

Judith Arcana is a Jane, a member of Chicago’s pre-Roe underground abortion service. She writes poems, stories, essays and books, including a much-loved biography of Grace Paley (Grace Paley’s Life Stories) and several poetry collections: What if your mother, 4th Period English, The Parachute Jump Effect, Announcements from the Planetarium, and Here From Somewhere Else, which received the Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award from Turtle Island Quarterly. She hosts a poetry show on KBOO in Oregon and online. Born and raised in the Great Lakes region, Judith has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1995. For more about, and examples of, her work, visit JudithArcana.com.

Listen here: Hello, This is Jane

Mark Nowak: Social Poetics

Interview by James Tracy

Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

Listen here: Social Poetics

Social Poetics: The Worker Writers School

Poetry from Worker Writers School poets: Christine Lewis, Davidson Garrett and Lorraine Garnett

Christine Lewis, originally from Trinidad, is a founding member of the Worker Writer School and Secretary Cultural Organizer with Domestic Workers United. Davidson Garrett, originally from Louisiana, recently retired as an NYC taxi driver after 40 years. And Lorraine Garnett, originally from Jamaica, is a domestic worker in Brooklyn. All are fabulous poets and have written superb coronavirus haiku.

The Worker Writers School supports writers from one of New York City’s most ubiquitous and yet least-heard populations: low-wage workers. Mark Nowak, a poet and former trade unionist, founded the institute at a Ford factory in 2011.

At monthly writing workshops, taxi drivers, nannies, street vendors, construction workers, food service workers, home-health aides, maids, nail salon manicurists, and retail cashiers, among many others, come together to re-imagine their working lives through poetry. The program also funds an annual writing retreat for students in upstate New York and a fall teaching assembly for writers, academics, workers, and the general public in New York City. More broadly, the program nurtures new literary voices directly from the global working class and inspires new tactics for working-class social change.

One Book, Many Communities

Kate Raphael introduces listeners to the unique One Book, Many Communities campaign, a project of Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. Each year, the group selects a title by a Palestinian author and groups around the world read the book in English or Arabic and host discussions and events around it. This year’s campaign is going forward in May and June despite the challenges created by shelter in place. The book this year is The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, a speculative fiction novel which imagines what happens when all Palestinian citizens of Israel suddenly disappear. Kate speaks with Toronto-based campaign coordinator Hilary Barlow about the project, the novel and the concept of occupational solidarity.

Listen here: One Book, Many Communities

Jennifer Worley: Neon Girls

Interview by James Tracy

From the book description:

When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way to earn more money, she found herself at the door of the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, auditioning on a stage surrounded by mirrors, in platform heels, and not much else. So began Jenny’s career as a stripper strutting the peepshow stage as her alter-ego “Polly” alongside women called Octopussy and Amnesia. But this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill strip club—it was a peepshow populated by free-thinking women who talked feminist theory and swapped radical zines like lipstick.

Listen here: Neon Girls

Ed Onaci: Free the Land

Interview by James Tracy

On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans’ best remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). New Afrikan citizens traced boundaries that encompassed a large portion of the South–including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana–as part of their demand for reparation. As champions of these goals, they framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States. New Afrikans also argued for financial restitution for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The struggle to “Free the Land” remains active to this day.

Listen here: Free the Land

Dr. Lane Windham: Knocking on Labor’s Door

May Day 2020 edition

Interview by James Tracy

The power of unions in workers’ lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools–like unions and labor law–with legislative gains from the civil and women’s rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers’ campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor’s decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing.

Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor’s Door dramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor’s future. Windham’s story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women’s history.

Listen here: Knocking on Labor’s Door

L.A. Kauffman: Direct Action

Interview by Ben Shepard

L.A. Kauffman has spent more than thirty years immersed in radical movements as a participant, strategist, journalist, and observer. Kauffman coordinated the grassroots mobilizing efforts for the huge protests against the Iraq war in 2003–04. Her writings on American radicalism and social movement history have been published in The Nation, n+1, The Baffler, and many other outlets.

Kauffman is the author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism and How to Read a Protest: The Art of Organizing and Resistance.

Listen here: Direct Action

Ellen Meeropol: Her Sister’s Tattoo

Interview by Kate Jessica Raphael

Her Sister’s Tattoo begins in the heat of August 1968, as sisters Esther and Rosa Cohen, daughters of union activists, march against the war in Vietnam. When a young man is beaten badly by police, Rosa persuades Esther to join her in a daring and risky action to stop the violence, but things don’t go as she plans. A cop is injured, and the two sisters are arrested on serious felonies. Esther makes an agonizing choice to take a plea deal in order to stay free to care for her infant daughter, but the deal requires her to testify against Rosa. As Rosa spends years underground and in prison, Esther deals with the loss of her sister, her community and parts of her self.

Listen here: Her Sister’s Tattoo

Susan Reverby: Co-conspirator for Justice

Interview by James Tracy

Alan Berkman (1945-2009) was no campus radical in the mid-1960s; he was a promising Ivy League student, football player, Eagle Scout, and fraternity president. But when he was a medical student and doctor, his politics began to change, and soon he was providing covert care to members of revolutionary groups like the Weather Underground and becoming increasingly radicalized by his experiences at the Wounded Knee takeover, at the Attica Prison uprising, and at health clinics for the poor. When the government went after him, he went underground and participated in bombings of government buildings. He was eventually captured and served eight years in some of America’s worst penitentiaries, barely surviving two rounds of cancer. After his release in 1992, he returned to medical practice and became an HIV/AIDS physician, teacher, and global health activist. In the final years of his life, he successfully worked to change U.S. policy, making AIDS treatment more widely available in the global south and saving millions of lives around the world.

Using Berkman’s unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and hundreds of interviews, Susan M. Reverby sheds fascinating light on questions of political violence and revolutionary zeal in her account of Berkman’s extraordinary transformation from doctor to co-conspirator for justice.

Listen here: Co-conspirator for Justice

Devin Zane Shaw: The Philosophy of Antifascism

Interview by James Tracy

Devin Shaw argues that in order to resist fascist mobilization, contemporary movements find a diversity of tactics more useful than principled nonviolence. Antifascism must focus on the systemic causes of the re-emergence of fascism, and thus must fight capital accumulation and the underlying white supremacism. Providing new, incisive interpretations of Beauvoir, existentialism, and Rancière, he makes the case for organizing a broader militant movement against fascism.

Listen here: The Philosophy of Antifascism

Matthew Sedillo: Mowing Leaves of Grass

Interview by Josiah Luis-Alderete

Born in El Sereno, California in 1981, Matt Sedillo writes from the vantage point of a second generation Chicano born in an era of diminishing opportunities and a crumbling economy. His writing – a fearless, challenging and at times even confrontational blend of humor, history and political theory – is a reflection of those realities. The poetry of Matt Sedillo is in turn a shot in the arm of pure revolutionary adrenaline and at others a sobering call for the fundamental restructuring of society in the interest of people not profits. Passionate, analytical, humorous and above all sincere, a revolutionary poet fortunate enough to be living in interesting times, the artistry of Matt Sedillo is a clarion call for all those who know a new world is not only possible but inevitable.​

Angel Dominguez: The Poetics of Decolonization

Interview by Josiah Luis-Alderete

Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and performance artist of Yucatec Mayan descent; the author of Desgraciado (Econo Textual Objects, 2017), and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015). His work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, Brooklyn Magazine, FENCE, NY Tyrant, Queen Mobs Teahouse, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @dandelionglitch or irl the redwoods, or ocean.

Listen here: The Poetics of Decolonization

Tim Murphy: Correspondents

Interview by Ben Shepard

Tim Murphy is the author of the novels “Correspondents” and “Christodora,” both published by Grove Atlantic. “Christodora” was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. He has been for nearly 20 years a journalist focusing mostly on HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ issues, for publications including the New York Times, New York magazine, Out magazine, the Nation, POZ magazine, and for the magazines of the ACLU and Lambda Legal. He was a founding member of the NYC-based activist groups Gays Against Guns and Rise and Resist. He lives in Queens NY. He can be reached @TimMurphyNYC. Since the pandemic began he’s been working to get kids in shelters food and supplies, as well as medical workers protective equipment. To help out, he asks that people reach out to @CutRedTape4Hero, a group that puts personal protective equipment directly into the hands of NYC coronavirus workers. In this interview he speaks about writing, HIV, and the ways this pandemic is impacting us.

Listen here: Correspondents

Marke Bieschke: Into the Streets A Young Person’s Visual History of Protest in the United States

Interview by James Tracy

This lively book guides readers through the art and history of significant protests, sit-ins, and collective acts of resistance throughout US history. Photos, artwork, signs, and other visual elements highlight the history of social action, from American Indian resistance to colonists through Black Lives Matter and Women’s Marches.

Into the Streets introduces the personalities and issues that drove these protests, as well as their varied aims and accomplishments, from spontaneous hashtag uprisings to highly planned strategies of civil disobedience. Perfect for young adult audiences, this book highlights how teens are frequently the ones protesting and creating the art of the resistance.

Listen here: Into the Streets

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: As Long as Grass Grows

Interview by Jeff Boyette.

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy.

Listen here: As Long as Grass Grows

Bill V. Mullen & Christopher Vials: The U.S. Anti-fascism Reader

Interview by James Tracy

Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism, ” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before Antifa became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organisers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.

Listen here: The U.S.Anti-fascism Reader

Jamie Schecter of the Prisoners Literature Project

Conversation with Jamie Schecter of the Prisoners Literature Project.

Interview by James Tracy

“The Prisoners Literature Project is an all-volunteer, non-profit group that sends free books directly to prisoners who request them from throughout the United States. Working almost continuously for thirty years, our U.S. prison books program has gotten (literally) tons of books into the American prison system, while staying overwhelmingly ‘grassroots’ – no full-time employees, no overhead eating up your donations.”

www.prisonlit.org

Listen here: Prisoners Literature Project

Eric Sawyer: ACT-UP NYC

Interview by Ben Shepard.

Eric Sawyer a long time social justice, HIV and Human Rights activist who is a founding member of ACT UP NY, a Co-Founder of Housing Works, Inc., a Co-Founder of HealthGAP, Inc., a former staff member of UNAIDS.

Listen here: ACT-UP NYC

Ellen Meeropol: Her Sister’s Tattoo

Interview by Kate Jessica Raphael

Her Sister’s Tattoo begins in the heat of August 1968, as sisters Esther and Rosa Cohen, daughters of union activists, march against the war in Vietnam. When a young man is beaten badly by police, Rosa persuades Esther to join her in a daring and risky action to stop the violence, but things don’t go as she plans. A cop is injured, and the two sisters are arrested on serious felonies. Esther makes an agonizing choice to take a plea deal in order to stay free to care for her infant daughter, but the deal requires her to testify against Rosa. As Rosa spends years underground and in prison, Esther deals with the loss of her sister, her community and parts of her self.

Listen here: Her Sister’s Tattoo

Carwil Bjork-James: Sovereign Street

Interview by James Tracy

Dr. Bjork-James is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on strategies of grassroots autonomy and disruptive protest in Latin America. His book, The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia, analyzes the takeover and use of urban space by grassroots social movements, particularly in the cities of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz. Using both anthropological and historical methods, he explores how pivotal public events generate political legitimacy, contribute to major (sometimes revolutionary) transformations in the balance of power, and provide models for future political action.

Listen here: Sovereign Street

Breanne Fahs: Burn It Down!

Interview by James Tracy

Burn It Down! is a landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto—raging and wanting, quarreling and provoking—has always played a central role in feminism, and it’s the angry, brash feminism we need now.

Listen here: Burn It Down!

Kazu Haga: Healing Resistance

Interview by: James Tracy

In Healing Resistance, Kazu Haga blazingly reclaims the energy and assertiveness of nonviolent practice and shows that a principled approach to nonviolence is a way to transform not only unjust systems but broken relationships.

Listen here: Healing Resistance

Hilary Moore and James Tracy: No Fascist USA!

Interview by: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Hilary Moore and James Tracy speak about the long arc of anti-fascist and anti-racist activism. Moore and Tracy are the authors or No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lesson’s For Today Movements.

Listen here: No Fascist USA!Interview by: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz