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/towhupw2ddA

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

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-cJ37SWc

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Sarah Jones and Sarah Lazare in conversation around Jones' new book Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass. This event will take place at Haymarket House, and will also be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.

In a compelling blend of personal narrative and in-depth reporting, New York magazine senior writer Sarah Jones exposes the harsh reality of America’s racial and income inequality and the devastating impact of the pandemic on our nation’s most vulnerable people.

Sarah Jones delves into the lives of the essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by COVID-19—not due to their age or profession, but because of the systemic inequality and poverty that left them exposed. She argues that America has abandoned a sacrificial underclass of millions, but insists that another future is possible. By addressing the pervasive issues of racial justice and public policy, Jones calls for a future where no one is seen as disposable again.

“Disposable is a massive work of journalism—and a masterful act of love. Both a scathing rebuke of corporate health care and a clear-eyed call to action, this book reminds us that we should not and cannot put the pandemic behind us.”

—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick.

Order a copy of Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass: https://bookshop.org/p/books/disposable-america-s-contempt-for-the-underclass-sarah-jones/21581827?ean=9781982197421&next=t&affiliate=1039

Speakers:

Sarah Jones is a senior writer for New York magazine, where she covers politics and religion. She was previously a staff writer for The New Republic and her work has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Dissent magazine. Jones won the 2019 Mirror Award for commentary and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is active on social media @OneSarahJones. Originally from rural Washington County, Virginia, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Sarah Lazare is a reporter based in Chicago. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including The Intercept and Jacobin. A former editor for In These Times, staff writer for AlterNet and Common Dreams, Sarah co-edited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.

This event is cosponsored by Haymarket Books, In These Times, and Pilsen Community Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loSbXlI9NDk

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Zhandarka Kurti, Jarrod Shanahan, and Dylan Rodríguez for a damning account of mass incarceration that reveals how powerful nonprofits and "progressives" used the language of social movements to build new jails.

In Skyscraper Jails, scholars and organizers Jarrod 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.

Speakers:

Zhandarka Kurti is an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Her work examines race, class, criminalization and punishment through a historical and contemporary perspective. She is the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and the Future of America’s Punishment System and editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.

Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America's Punishment System, and City Time: On Being Sentence to Rikers Island and editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity. He lives in Chicago and works as an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in University Park, IL.

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Join Nafis Hasan and Tayyaba Jiwani in conversation on the rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and how to center our efforts to combat cancer on the basis of care. Organized by Common Notions, Jamhoor, Science for the People, and Haymarket Books.

More than fifty years after the declaration of the War on Cancer, we are nowhere closer to victory. The problem lies in the way cancer is understood and the “cancer-industrial complex” that has been established to address it.

Metastasis brings the cancer-industrial complex to the fore of our understanding of what cancer is, the chronic nature of the disease, its unmistakable parallels to capitalism, its inextricable link to the neoliberal model of economic development, and its disproportionate burden on nonwhite and poor populations—and what it will really take to rid ourselves of the gravest dangers to our individual and collective well-being.

Nafis Hasan received his PhD in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology from Tufts University in 2019. He is currently an Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a labor organizer based in Philadelphia. His writings have appeared in Jacobin, Science for the People, The Trouble, and more. He serves as an editor for the radical science magazine Science for the People and South Asian left media platform Jamhoor, and is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Read more at nafishasan.com.

Tayyaba Jiwani completed her PhD in molecular biology from the University of Toronto and currently researches the political dimensions of genomics as a fellow at the University of Exeter. She is also an editor at Jamhoor, a South Asia-focused left media platform.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Common Notions, Jamhoor, and Science for the People.

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani-Muslim woman who is currently serving an unjust 86-year sentence at the only federal medical prison in the United States, FMC Carswell, notoriously known as the “Hospital of Horrors.” For Aafia and countless others at the Hospital of Horrors, their punishment goes beyond captivity, and mirrors a pattern of abuse and neglect that is pervasive in women’s prisons across the U.S.

Join us in learning about Dr. Siddiqui’s case, the function of abuse at FMC Carswell and other women’s prisons, and ongoing efforts to demand justice for state violence survivors.

To learn more about Dr. Siddiqui’s case follow: @aafiamovementofficial on Instagram

Learn more about the Texas People’s Tribunal: https://texaspeoplestribunal.com/

More information on Missouri Justice Coalition: https://mojustice.org/

Join the Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition mailing list: https://dublinprisonsolidarity.org/

Speakers:

Diana Block is a long time feminist, abolitionist, social justice activist. She is a founding and active member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and the Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition. Diana is also an author and writes for online journals. You can learn more about her work at dianablock.com.

Kendra Drysdale is a motivational speaker, and an advocate for transformative justice, trauma healing, and rehabilitation. She was a part of the class action lawsuit against FCI Dublin, and is a survivor advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Dublin Prison Solidarity Committee.

Kaley Johnson is a Texas-based freelance journalist. Her work includes investigations into FMC Carswell federal prison, uncovering systemic issues in the Texas criminal justice system, following social justice movements in North Texas, and stories centering on vulnerable populations.

Tania Siddiqi is an attorney and the Founder and Executive Director of the Texas People’s Tribunal. Her work focuses on creating and implementing effective strategies against state violence. She has led both regional and international movement-centered initiatives. Tania is the Editor of #WithoutJustCause: The Case of U.S.-Held Political Prisoner Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.

ML Smith is the Founder of Missouri Justice Coalition. She is a criminal punishment system-impacted advocate, abolitionist and activist who experienced incarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made her intimately aware of the dire reality faced by our imprisoned populations, as well as the egregious actions and apathy of institution staff and administrators.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Texas People’s Tribunal and Missouri Justice Coalition.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOGW633rRh0

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join editors and contributors of Abolish Social Work (As We Know It) and Abolition and Social Work for a discussion about the intersections of abolitionist politics and principles and social work.

Pick up a copy of Abolish Social Work (As We Know it) here: https://btlbooks.com/book/abolish-social-work

Pick up a copy of Abolition and Social Work here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2226-abolition-and-social-work

Pick up a copy of Not Your Rescue Project here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2258-not-your-rescue-project

Pick up the Creative Interventions Toolkit: https://www.akpress.org/creative-interventions-toolkit.html

Moment of Truth Statement of Commitment to Black Lives: https://wscadv.org/news/moment-of-truth-statement-of-commitment-to-black-lives

Speakers:

Cameron W. Rasmussen is an educator, researcher, social worker, and facilitator. Cameron is an Assistant Professor in the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His research is focused on issues of accountability, restorative and transformative justice, and the intersections of social work and abolition. 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 Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW). He completed his PhD in the Social Welfare program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Craig Fortier - (they/them) is an Associate Professor in Social Development Studies at Renison University College (University of Waterloo). They have been involved in community based organizing with migrant justice, queer/trans* liberation, anti-capitalist, Indigenous solidarity, and abolitionist movements. Craig is the author of Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism and co-editor of Abolish Social Work (As We Know It). Their research is interdisciplinary, experiential, and rooted in day-to-day organizing work - including studies on colonialist memorialization projects, queer and trans* community sports, social work history, social movement organizing, and political theory. They currently reside in Tkaronto/Toronto (Michi Saagiig Nishaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee territories) and acts as a co-commissioner in the Field of Dreamers Cooperative Softball association, playing shortstop for the Don River Curse Breakers.

Durrell Malik Washington Sr. is an Abolitionist, a Social Worker, Educator and PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. His research interest lies at the intersections between P.I.C. Abolition, Juvenile legal law, policy and other youth serving systems, Black families, and Health. Durrell is a Beyond Prisons Fellow at UChicago and a collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work.

Mimi Kim is a longtime community accountability/transformative justice practitioner. As a co-founder of Incite! and founder of Creative Interventions, Mimi has challenged interpersonal and state violence through the building of community-based liberatory practice. She is currently re-launching the StoryTelling & Organizing Project through a Stories for Power collaboration between Creative Interventions and Just Practice. Mimi is also an Associate Professor of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach.

Chanelle Gallant - (she/her) is a movement writer, organizer, strategist and consultant and co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice (Haymarket Books, 2024). She co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project, SURJ-Toronto and has provided training and advocacy on sex work and racial justice, from city hall to the United Nations. Chanelle sits on the national board for Showing Up for Racial Justice and Catalyst Project and has helped to move millions into organizing through donor advising and grassroots fundraising. She holds an MA in Sociology and was a Lambda Literary Fellow. Find her at chanellegallant.com

Sena Hussain (she/her) is a social worker, editor, and prison abolitionist based in Toronto. She has spent over a decade supporting criminalized and marginalized people through harm reduction, advocacy, and direct support. Sena is the editor of Cell Count, a publication amplifying the voices of prisoners and has co-facilitated workshops in federal prisons on health and harm reduction. Her work is rooted in anti-oppressive practice, abolitionist organizing, and a commitment to systemic change.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo7juGv5H2o

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Rick Perlstein, Jean Casella, and David Neiwert as they discuss the updated edition of Blood in the Face by James Ridgeway.

In 1990, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture was the first book to uncover the contours, beliefs, leaders, and wider influence of the American racist far-right movement. It told their story from the inside out, complete with interviews, recruiting pamphlets, cartoons, rants, sermons, threats, police reports, and more. The accompanying analysis by veteran investigative reporter James Ridgeway detailed the movement 's volatile history and its expansion beginning in the 1980s, insisting that the groups making up this "fringe" culture were too powerful--and too much a part of American culture--to be ignored or dismissed.

When the book's prescience about the dangers of the racist far-right became manifest in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, a second edition of Blood in the Face was released with a new introduction charting the rise of the Militia Movement to which Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators were connected. Since then, both the book and the documentary film that accompanied its release (also titled Blood in the Face), have earned cult followings.

In the past 25 years, Ridgeway's final warning–that the "fringe was becoming part of the fabric" of American politics and culture, have come to chilling fruition in the rise of the Tea Party, the racist backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama, the resurgence of anti-immigrant Nativism, the growth of racist far-right media, and the election of Donald Trump with the thunderous support of white nationalists.

Join Rick Perlstein, Jean Casella, and David Neiwert as they discuss Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump and its continued relevance.

Speakers:

Chicagoan Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-book series on the rise of conservatism in America. The first, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2001. The second, third, and fourth made the New York Times bestseller list, with the second, Nixonland, appearing on the “best of” lists of over a dozen publications in 2008. A contributor to publications including the Nation, Washington Post, New Yorker, New Republic, he is the former president of the board of InThese Times magazine and a frequent talking head on cable news and history documentaries.

Jean Casella collaborated with James Ridgeway for more than 30 years, editing both the original 1991 edition and the revised 2025 edition of Blood in the Face. In 2009, she and Ridgeway co-founded Solitary Watch, a watchdog project that exposes solitary confinement and other abusive conditions in U.S. prisons and jails. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, and Mother Jones, among others. For her work on prisons, she received a Soros Justice Media Fellowship and an Alicia Patterson Fellowship.

David Neiwert is an investigative journalist and author based in the Pacific Northwest. Though now retired from daily newsroom operations, he worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in Idaho, Montana, and Washington from the 1970s to the 1990s, when he made the leap to digital journalism in the early iterations of MSNBC's Redmond newsroom, where he won a National Press Club award for distinguished online journalism.

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1651-blood-in-the-face

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_PjcK3j8sI

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò for a conversation with Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson to celebrate the release of the new paperback edition of Reconsidering Reparations.

A clear, new case for reparations as a “constructive,” future-oriented project that responds to the weight of history’s injustices with the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. Centuries ago, Táíwò explains, European powers engineered the systems through which advantages and disadvantages still flow. Colonialism and transatlantic slavery forged schemes of injustice on an unprecedented scale, a world order he calls “global racial empire.” The project of justice must meet the same scope.

Táíwò’s analysis not only discourages despair, it demands global resistance. Reconsidering Reparations suggests policies, goals, and organizing strategies. And it leaves readers with clear and powerful advice: act like an ancestor. Do what we can to shape the world we want our moral descendants to inherit, and have faith that they will continue the long struggle for justice. This understanding, Táíwò shows, has deep roots in the thought of Black political thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cedric Robinson, and Nkechi Taifa.

Reconsidering Reparations is a book with profound implications for our views of justice, racism, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and climate change policy.

Speakers:

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Elite Capture, a contributor to Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book, and a past recipient of a Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar fellowship. Táíwò’s public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Hammer & Hope (where he is a member of the Editorial Team). His writings have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Korean, among other languages.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is an Affrilachian (Black Appalachian) woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. She is the first Black woman to serve as Co-Executive Director of Highlander Research & Education Center. As a member of leadership teams in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Ash-Lee has contributed to the Vision for Black Lives and BREATHE Act. She has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of National Bailout Collective. She is a long-time activist who has worked in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, LGBTQUIA+, environmental justice etc.

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2538-reconsidering-reparations

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFaucLXi_ag

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us as we celebrate the launch of The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration edited by Brandon Shimoda and Brynn Saito. The event will begin with words from poet and concentration camp survivor Mitsuye Yamada followed by readings and conversation with Cathlin Goulding, Michael Ishii, Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Emily Mitamura, Paulette “Tkl' Un Yeik” Moreno, Carolyn Nakagawa, Michael Prior, and Anne Yukie Watanabe.

This event is co-sponsored by Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates and allies working to end detention sites and support directly impacted immigrant and refugee communities that are being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies.

Pick up a copy of The Gate of Memory here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...

Intro song for live broadcast: "There Is No Moment In Which They Are Not With Me" by contributor Patrick Shiroishi off his album Evergreen

Speakers:

Cathlin Goulding is an educator and curriculum designer. A former public school teacher, she codirects YURI Education Project, an education consultancy that helps PK-12 educators teach and tell Asian American histories. Her grandparents and mother were incarcerated at the Jerome and Gila River camps. She lives in Queens, New York.

Michael Ishii is a healer, artist, and community organizer. His mother and her family were incarcerated at Minidoka concentration camp and his upstate NY relatives were massacred during WWII. Much of his life has been devoted to the work of nonviolence and healing multigenerational trauma related to Japanese American WWII incarceration.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, and Mothersalt, forthcoming from Alice James Books in May. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Left Margin LIT in Berkeley, and her grandparents and great-grandparents were incarcerated at Rohwer and Lordsburg.

Emily Mitamura is a Yonsei poet and scholar of race, gender, empire, and film. With commitments to women of color and Third World feminisms, their work takes up archival, relational, and bodily hauntings in the afterlives of mass and colonial violence. Her family was incarcerated at Poston and Heart Mountain.

Paulette “Tkl' Un Yeik” Moreno is a civil rights leader, poet, and speaker. Her grandfather, George Kamachi Miyasato Sr, and her Uncle George Miyasato Jr, were incarcerated during World War II in Lordsburg, NM and Minidoka. Paulette and Harriet Miyasato Beleal, her mother, are journeying to share their vision of truth that reflects Worth.

Carolyn Nakagawa is a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian poet and playwright who makes her home in the territory colonized as Vancouver, British Columbia. Her paternal grandparents were forcibly uprooted from Steveston and lived in Magna Bay and Westbank before returning to Vancouver in 1950. She is currently seeking a publisher for her full-length poetry manuscript.

Michael Prior is a poet and teacher. His grandparents and their families were incarcerated in Tashme, a camp located on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples. Prior’s most recent book of poems, Burning Province, won the 2021 BC & Yukon Book Prize for poetry and the 2020 Canada-Japan Literary Award.

Brynn Saito’s third collection of poetry, Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press, 2023), was inspired by her visit with her father to Gila River, the place where her aunt, grandparents, and other family members were incarcerated. Brynn teaches at California State University, Fresno.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including The Grave on the Wall and The Afterlife Is Letting Go, both from City Lights. He had family in Heart Mountain, Poston, and Fort Missoula, where his grandfather was incarcerated under suspicion of being a spy for Japan.

Anne Yukie Watanabe (she/her) is a queer femme yonsei and shin-nisei nurse, organizer, peer counselor and writer living in Chicago. Her grandparents were incarcerated in Tashme and Lillooet in Canada. She is a founding member of Nikkei Uprising, a Nikkei group that organizes for collective liberation with an abolitionist and anti-imperialist lens.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Tsuru for Solidarity, and The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRd1HvGzSPk

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org