This fall, join Margaret Killjoy on tour as she celebrates the release of her forthcoming collection We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories. Registration details to be announced.
“For this impressive collection, Killjoy (the Danielle Cain series) brings together 21 speculative shorts tinged with just the right amount of horror to keep readers gloriously uncomfortable… Throughout, Killjoy showcases her gift for blending cerebral speculation with visceral thrills. There’s plenty to chew on here.” —Publishers Weekly
Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. Here, we have collected the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride. They’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes fearless, mind-expanding fiction.
Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author born and raised in Maryland who was spent her adult life traveling with no fixed home. A 2015 graduate of Clarion West, Margaret’s short fiction has been published by Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Vice’s Terraform, and Fireside Fiction, amongst others. She is the author of A Country of Ghosts, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, and The Barrow Will Send What it May. She is also the host of the podcast Live Like the World is Dying and Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on iHeartRadio. She is based in rural West Virginia.
WASHINGTON September 20 @ 7PM Gray Coast Guildhall 11 Old Church Road Quilcene, WA 98376 *RSVP NOT REQUIRED.
WASHINGTON September 22 @ 7PM Left Bank Books 92 Pike Seattle, WA 98101 *MASKS REQUIRED IN STORE *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
OREGON September 23 @ 7PM with Robert Evans Powell’s City of Books 1005 W. Burnside Street Portland, OR 97209 *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
VIRTUAL EVENT September 29 @ 4PM PT /7PM ET with Cadwell Turnbull Firestorm Co-op RSVP
CALIFORNIA October 6 @ 7PM Chevalier’s Books 133 N. Larchmont Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90004
ARIZONA October 12 @ 7PM BCC Tucson 101 E. Ventura Street Tucson, AZ 85705 *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
TEXAS October 15 @ 7PM Monkeywrench Books 110 N. Loop Blvd E Austin, TX 78751 *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
October 18 @ 6:30PM The Montrose Center 401 Branard Street Room 107 Houston, TX 77006
LOUISIANA October 23 @ 11AM – 5PM A.C.A.B. Zine Fest Casa Gasa 4920 Freret Street New Orleans, LA 70115 FREE & *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
GEORGIA October 25 @ 6PM Atlanta Vintage Books 3660 Clairmont Road Atlanta, GA 30341 *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
NORTH CAROLINA October 26 @ 6PM Durham County Library 300 N. Roxboro Street Durham, NC 27701
VIRGINIA October 28 @ 7PM Small Friend Records & Books 1 N. Lombardy Street Richmond, VA 23220 *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
MARYLAND November 3 @ 7PM Red Emma’s 3128 Greenmount Avenue Baltimore, MD 21218
PENNSYLVIANIA November 18 @ 6:30pm The Big Idea Cooperative Bookstore 4812 Liberty Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15224 *RSVP NOT REQUIRED
This weekend on August 6th & 7th, join us for the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. Don’t forget to swing by the AK Press table to say hi and grab some books! This event is free and open for anarchists and people curious about anarchism.
The Anarchist Bookfair takes place in two buildings, which are across from each other (maps below).
CEDA 2515, rue Delisle CEDA is an adult education and community center based in Little Burgundy/St-Henri.
The main floor of CEDA is accessible to people using wheelchairs.
Please note: The CEDA entrance for people needing to use the wheelchair ramp is via the rear parking lot to the left of 2520, avenue Lionel-Groulx, before Vinet, but after Charlevoix.
The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair venues are a few flat blocks from metro Lionel-Groulx. General information about this metro station is available online here: http://www.stm.info/english/metro/a-m36.htm#Lignes
This metro station is wheelchair accessible (there is an elevator to both platform levels). This will only be useful if you are coming from one of the 6 other wheelchair accessible metro stations (Montmorency, de la Concorde, Cartier, Berri-UQAM, Henri-Bourassa or Côte-Vertu). Please note that all of these stations are along the orange Line of the system.
Lionel-Groulx Metro is also a major hub for buses. The following buses stop at Lionel-Groulx Metro during the regular daytime schedule. Beside each is a link to the online schedule. On the schedule, wheelchair accessible buses are marked by a star ( * ).
On Wednesday, August 31st at 7:00pm EDT, join author Kung Li Sun, Mary Hooks, and Charis Books & More for a book launch event celebrating the release of Begin the World Over.
Charis welcomes Kung Li Sun in conversation with Mary Hooks for a celebration of Begin the World Over, a revolutionary tale of Black and Indigenous insurrection. History as it should have been. Begin the World Over is a counterfactual novel about the Founders’ greatest fear—that Black and Indigenous people might join forces to undo the newly formed United States of America—coming true.
In 1793, as revolutionaries in the West Indies take up arms, James Hemings has little interest in joining the fight for liberty –talented and favored, he is careful to protect his relative comforts as Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef. But when he meets Denmark Vesey, James is immediately smitten. The formidable first mate persuades James to board his ship, on its way to the revolt in Saint-Domingue. There and on the mainland they join forces with a diverse cast of characters, including a gender nonconforming prophetess, a formerly enslaved jockey, and a Muskogee horse trader. The resulting adventure masterfully mixes real historical figures and events with a riotous retelling of a possible history in which James must decide whether to return to his constrained but composed former life, or join the coalition of Black revolutionaries and Muskogee resistance to fight the American slavers and settlers.
Kung Li Sun is a lifelong southerner currently based on the Gulf Coast. As a public interest attorney in Atlanta, she brought class-action lawsuits on behalf of people in prisons and jails. He left lawyering to support undocumented and abolitionist organizers as a strategist and trainer, and to write. This is their first novel.
Mary Hooks is a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother and Field Secretary on the field team for the Movement for Black Lives. Mary is the former co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and began organizing with the organization in 2010. Growing up in a family that migrated from Mississippi to the Midwest, Mary’s commitment to liberation is rooted in her experiences and the impacts of the War on Drugs on her community.
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle. Charis Circle’s mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
Please contact info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don’t hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.
The Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair is an annual event that brings together people interested and engaged in radical work to connect, learn, and discuss through books and information tables, workshops, panel discussions, skillshares, films, and more! We seek to create an inclusive space to introduce new folks to anarchism, foster a productive dialogue between various political traditions as well as anarchists from different milieus, and create an opportunity to dissect our movements’ strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and tactics.
Revolutionary Organizing Against Racism (ROAR) started as a conference in 2017 during the anti-fascist movement to translate the street protests that were happening all over the U.S. into a more radical analysis about racism’s key role in our entire social structure. We know it’s not enough to oppose street-level white supremacy and that ICE and the prisons are much more efficient institutions at upholding white supremacy and that if you are anti-racist, you must turn your attention to revolutionary politics. We’re happy you are here, and we hope you enjoy our revolutionary content.
This summer, investigative journalist and author Robert Evans will be on tour to promote the release of After the Revolution! Registration details below.
What will the fracturing of the United States look like? After the Revolution is an edge-of-your-seat answer to that question. In the year 2070, twenty years after a civil war and societal collapse of the “old” United States, extremist militias battle in the crumbling Republic of Texas. As the violence spreads like wildfire and threatens the Free City of Austin, three unlikely allies will have to work together in an act of resistance to stop the advance of the forces of the Christian ethnostate known as the “Heavenly Kingdom.”
Robert Evans, the author of A Brief History of Vice, has had an eclectic career as an investigative journalist reporting from war zones in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, and reporting on domestic radicalism in the US. He hosts the podcasts Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here for iHeartRadio, is a writer for the humor website Cracked, and an investigative journalist for Bellingcat. He resides in Portland, OR.
PORTLAND 05/03 Powell’s City of Books 1005 W Burnside St. Portland Portland, OR 97209 *RSVP Not Required
SEATTLE 05/09 Third Place Books 17171 Bothell Way NE, #A101 Lake Forest Park WA 98155
LOS ANGELES 05/12 Chevalier’s Books 133 N Larchmont Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90004
05/17 Firestorm Co-op Virtual Event with Margaret Killjoy
NEW YORK 05/19 Strand Bookstore 828 Broadway 3rd Floor, Rare Book Room New York, NY 10036
Music is a huge part of everything that I do. I spend most of my time listening to music and looking for new music. It informs all of my politics and has been a radicalizing force in my life from my earliest days growing up in the church. Music isn’t a hobby or convenient distraction, it’s at the core of my being. I have been making playlists for years to try to help people through hard times with songs that inspire, comfort, and push me to action. I started doing this when I was working with the Praxis Center at Kalamazoo College as an editor for the race, class, and immigration section of their blog. I also made two during the pandemic when I was organizing, teaching, and writing. So, naturally, I made one to go with my book. You’ll see a few references to music throughout the text if you pick it up, but not nearly as many as I could have put. I think I’m going to have to write a book that’s strictly dedicated to music. It means too much to me not to. So, I’ve attached an accompanying playlist of songs related to this text. These are songs that inspired The Nation on No Map. Some complement the text and others conflict with it. Others are simply different songs I enjoyed while things were coming together on my journey to the last page. And some are symbolic. Hear me out!
If you’re willing to listen to my musical
selections, please also consider a short reading list of texts that could be
read alongside this book too. Many of them influenced this book and my thinking
about the topics at hand.
Featuring: An essay by William C. Anderson on ideology, Black anarchism, and his forthcoming book The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism & Abolition.
The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism & Abolition, now available for preorder at AK Press.
If there’s
one thing I learned from Black anarchism, it’s
to transcend. I am not just a Black anarchist because I want to systematize or
institutionalize Black anarchism. I’m
not wed to it and I’m
not dedicated to any cause like that because the entire point is not to be.
However, I have internalized its lessons and that’s why I wrote The Nation on No Map. The lessons
Black anarchism offers can help show us how to transcend the pre-arranged narratives
that hold us back. I believe that Black anarchism has done so in many ways and
provided a framework that we can observe. Social movements have long been
plagued with orthodoxy, cultism, and limitations that I feel have poisoned the
roots. People have put ideology before liberation at the expense of progress
and it’s blatant how much this is deterring us in a world that’s facing rapidly compounding unimaginable crises. I
learned a long time ago that a lot of people don’t actually want liberation, they just want control,
authority, and power. Furthermore, they don’t
make any distinctions between these things. Oftentimes with oppression, people
start thinking that having what the oppressor has (the ability to oppress) is
the goal; it’s
not. Ultimately, I think it’s
time to gather what we need from the history we’ve been offered and move beyond the stories we like to
tell ourselves about the past and the present for the realization of something
far greater. Black anarchism can provide helpful insights.
Founding Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin familiarized me with the task at hand to “raise the contradictions.” He was talking about exposing the inconsistencies between what the state, society, and what the world promises but does not deliver. I’d already been thinking about something similar in terms that expanded beyond ideological positions to something much deeper. I was beginning to ask questions about things that Marxism, classical anarchism, and doctrinaire politics could not answer. They have always had to be reshaped and extended in ways by those that are most marginalized within their ranks. This led me to interrogate questions of contradictions within ourselves and how we internalize them. Autonomous Black radicalisms of all sorts gave me a model and method which I found most useful in guiding my own political growth to do so.
The Nation on No Map is a humble attempt to use my own understanding and the lessons I’ve learned to trace a liberatory path. I believe that challenging the supposed necessity of the nation-state and removing the ways of thinking that feed into it are top priorities. I examine different relationships that Black America has with certain aspects of the past and use Black Anarchism to interrupt and trouble them as I look around. I can see clearly that the importance of an actual radical struggle is more important than just having the appearance of one. That is to say, some of the radicalism and revolutionary politics around us are held back by a lack of imagination. And we’re certainly going to need new ideas amid the flourishing discussions of abolition which I believe need an anti-state emphasis. A free future remains out of reach when antiquated, conservative ideas get repeatedly recycled. For Black America, the problems we experience as it relates to things like citizenship, migration, and nationhood illustrate the point I hope to make. The truth is in the mirror.
There’s
so much to talk about but there are barriers getting in the way of our growth
because people assume we’ve
already figured things out. We haven’t,
and we should call everything into question if we’re willing to admit as much. There are a wide array of
self-proclaimed liberatory politics we have before us that impede liberation
when they become cloaks for rigidity, religiosity and unthinking reformism. If
the answer to questions about the future is to endlessly parrot the dead
politics of yesteryear, we’re
failing. Not knowing things (yet) isn’t
always bad, but assuming we know everything already because we don’t want to question
prescribed beliefs is dangerous. What history gets overlooked? What questions
go unanswered? Whose stories get erased? Which ones get revised, edited, and
written over? The questions that go unanswered because some are unwilling to
ask are many.
I try my best to highlight this in my work. For example, this is a problem that plagues the Western left and radical movements who are drowning in their own dogma because of a staunch unwillingness to rise above doctrine. The left is stuck because it cannot get over the idea of itself and its self-centered infatuation with its past, and this prevents it from overcoming oppressions that are constantly reconfiguring. Our worst nightmares reorganize themselves while leftists desperately await the return of a dream they once had. They long to stay asleep, anticipating that the same heroes, villains, and storyline will reappear so they can reclaim the past fantasies they cling to. Sometimes when they can’t find victory around them, they’ll even excuse the very forms of violence they claim to be against as a means of defending ideological delusion, not oppressed people. Oppressors are warmly embraced by those who haven’t yet figured out, or are unwilling to admit, that tyranny can change clothes.
It’s this sort of orthodoxy and hagiography holding back our hopes of achieving liberation because they force creativity to fall by the wayside. Furthermore, they gloss over limitations and contradictions in favor of faithful dedication to ideas that may very well be expired, exhausted, or even lifeless. The new must be born so that we can overcome, but the movements and traditions I lament are overly obsessed with venerating what’s bygone to such an extent that they preserve too much of the old. That history is usually only recalled to be praised despite the horrors, killings, and betrayals that would tarnish the reputations of radicals’ favorite heroes if they even believe those things happened at all. Growth is lost because there are no recognizable problems to grow from. You can’t fix a historical issue you refuse to acknowledge. Patriots are patriots no matter where you go.
Maybe some critics will dislike my text and will attempt to make
it an ideological conflict, but the real confrontation is inside of us. It lies
in the hurdles we fail to surpass because we’re
more dedicated to supposedly being right than admitting what’s wrong. To make any of this simply about ideological
disagreements, is to attack a house The Nation on No Map is not even in.
This is one reason I find great parallels in the study of Zen Buddhism, which
carries strains of thought dedicated to a needed self-destruction. Those
insights underscore this entire book. The Nation on No Map is a
self-immolating text that I truly struggled to finish. I felt aflame while I
was writing it and the fear that arose imagining plumes of smoke around me made
it hard to focus. I fought amongst past and present versions of myself in a
furnace of my own making. When I completed this attempt and the ashes settled I
came across the death poem of the Zen monk, Kogaku Soko, who died at 84 years
of age in 1548 saying:
My final words are these:
As I fall I throw all on a high mountain peak –
Lo! All creation shatters; thus it is
That I destroy Zen doctrine.
The arrogance of orthodox ideology is the assumption that someone can know everything about the outside world while refusing to step outdoors to gain an internal critique. Self-reflection is crucial, but far too many among us are scared of the uncomfortable realization they might find. We will have to tear down idols and be willing to tell the truth about the monuments we’ve built. We will have to get over ourselves because a lot of us may very well be blocking our own path. Black anarchism can help us trace how that happens and give us organizing principles to fight back, meet material needs, and transcend radicalisms that are not taking us far enough, and that may not even be so radical at all. Much has to be overturned and some of that will occur from within. In order for revolution to happen, we will actually have to think and do things revolutionarily.
William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Nation on No Map and the co-author of As Black as Resistance. He is the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and also provides creative direction as one of the producers of the Black Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014).
Register here to attend the first webinar Lessons In Liberation: Grounding Education in Abolition on September 1, 2021 at 4:00pm PST.
All webinars will be streamed via YouTube and Facebook. ASL Interpretation will be provided by Certified Deaf Interpreters and Deaf Interpreters. We will also provide CART Captions. Please contact Sheeva (she or they) at abolitionisteducation@gmail.com for any additional accessibility needs or accessibility questions.
Demystifying forces of the state, gangs, and revolutionary violence.
In Gang Politics, Kristian Williams examines our society’s understanding of social and political violence, what gets romanticized, misunderstood, or muddled. He explores the complex intersections between “gangs” of all sorts—cops and criminals, Proud Boys and Antifa, Panthers and skinheads—arguing that government and criminality are intimately related, often sharing critical features. As society becomes more polarized and conflict more common, Williams’s analysis is a crucial corrective to our usual ideas about the role violence might or should play in our social struggles.
Kristian Williams is the author of six books, including Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Williams has been actively writing and leading discourse on anarchism in historical and present-day contexts, social inequalities, and critiques on police and political force since the 1990s. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
PHILADELPHIA 07/03 Wooden Shoe Books @ 7PM 704 South Street Philadelphia, PA 19147 *RSVP Not Required
Featuring: An excerpt by abolitionist educator Sagnicthe Salazar
Just in time for the back-to-school season, Lessons In Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit For Educators, a resource that establishes foundational knowledge on incorporating abolition and liberation in, by, and through our education system, will be available this September. You can preorder your copy now!
Lessons In Liberation is a collaborative work, a labor of patience and love, and more than five years in the making with contributors including but not limited to Education For Liberation Network, Critical Resistance, Black Organizing Project, Chicago Women’s Health Center, Mariame Kaba and the MILPA Collective, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Bettina L. Love, and so many more.
This reader is essential for teachers, organizers, parents, students—and pretty much anyone interested in increasing the reach of abolitionist ideas. It consists of a collection of tools and essays from a variety of abolitionist organizers, healers, and educators who have done and continue to do the work: effectively illustrating and breaking down the endless possibilities of intentional liberation and collective abolitionist movement. Each contributor emphasizes how it is crucial to support our communities, our youth and young people, and our educators with the political vision of a shared goal in mind—to eliminate all forms of policing and creating a sustainable world for us all. It is both deeply understood and conveyed that the role that the education system as we know it feeds and sustains carceral punishment and prison industrial complex in all its forms. Despite this, we know that another world is possible.
Lessons In Liberation is structured in three parts: Openings And Groundings, Everyday in Every Way, and Growing Our Work. In each, the book examines the varying yet interconnected ways of building our analysis, knowledge, and power.
Lessons In Liberation is a love letter to all those who came before, as well as those who will grow, learn, and unlearn as a result of that radical love.
Reflections from a Dean of Transformative Discipline: What Abolitionist Education Means to Me
by Sagnicthe Salazar (an excerpt from the book Lessons in Liberation)
A part of our job as abolitionist educators is to break the system that is working perfectly well as a
tentacle of imperialism that needs the prison industrial complex for its ongoing success.
As teachers, we must break that system and break the hegemonic notion that Black and Brown
bodies are naturally inclined to crime or to violence. We must break the myth that Black and Brown
bodies don’t value education. We must end the idea that Black and Brown bodies engage in activities
that require cops, prisons, policing, or detention centers.
Once we break with these ideas, we must begin to talk as a school system, as educators, with young people and with our families about safety: Safety from what? For whom? How do we keep our folks safe from poverty? How do we keep our folks safe from houselessness, joblessness, from food deserts, from the perpetual stress that they live with on a day-to-day basis with these helicopters circling overhead, and having to fight for basic necessities that should be human rights?
Talking about these questions together helps to illuminate other crucial threads: there’s a reason why there’s so many Black and Brown folks in homeless encampments and prisons. There’s a reason why the number of Black and Brown bodies being killed by police is so high. There’s a reason why white supremacists march down the street, feeling all fine and dandy while our folks can’t even breathe. Building a thread between those things—why our people are dying in prisons and dying in poverty—helps us to begin to see the crucial need to also heal.
Business as usual won’t help.
This reality has impacted our bodies for hundreds of years, for generations. We need to be able
to talk about what’s happening with our children, with our teachers, in our schools. We must take a pause and actually engage around what is happening and have a conversation with each other about
our material conditions. And we need to think, talk, feel, and dream: what does it mean to have a
world without police, without prisons?
The education system has worked so goddamn well that our babies, our families, our folks tend
to be the most punitive people, because we’ve internalized the state’s line and we have internalized
the belief that we need to hurt people that hurt us. We need to punish. What to do when someone
breaks a class agreement or gets into a fight? Often we are the first to say suspend, expel, punish—all
these things. We haven’t given our children, our families, our communities an opportunity to dream
of something different. If punishment is all you know, then you can’t begin to do the work to build
something different. And so, first and foremost, we need to create the space to say it is possible; let’s
dream of what is, and how it is, possible.
This isn’t a new movement. Let’s give credit to the people who are doing this work already. In the Bay Area some schools have been mobilizing to not have cops in schools, not have security guards, not have JROTC. These organizations—particularly the young people in them—are doing the overt work of removing the prison state from our schools. This work is crucial, but often we’re missing the work of challenging and dismantling the many ways—often more covert—in which communities and also schools devalue humans, and particularly Black and Brown bodies. We devalue children, perpetuate isolation and punishment, and make some of our children disposable. How do we recognize and challenge how our families replicate these systems? The deep work within is to shift our thought process so that we actually value life and breathe life into the building through our practices towards every warm body in the school building, from teachers to students to families to administrators.
One of the things that we do at our school, every time that we look at our data, is look at the
racial disproportionality: Is the number of students that are having disciplinary issues proportional to our population? And often, we see that that’s not the case. So we got to go back to the drawing board
and think about and question: How are we replicating the system? How are we devaluing life, and
how can we breathe life through the day-to-day systems?
As a Dean of Discipline, and in my particular role as Dean of Transformative Discipline, I also like to share with folks that being an abolitionist educator is also about having both super high expectations and also zero tolerance for hurting each other. Our children, our communities, have infinite capacity to meet our high expectations. To have zero tolerance for hurting each other means that we need to hold a high line that leads towards love, towards care, towards compassion. When a student or an adult kind of goes past that line, how do we actually walk with them with support? How do we actually bring that loving care that we want them to reverberate in building, and how do we have consistent practices to show that love to each other? How do we want people to relate to each other in their day-to-day, so that when they’re outside the school walls they are relating in a way where love reverberates? A part of our practices needs to be to have zero tolerance for hurting each other, and we can get there through showing consistent intense love and the true valuing of each other’s lives.
