AK Baltimore visits the Big Apple for Left Forum 2010
(Wow, is this a busy Spring for tabling! There’s really too many amazing events every March and April it seems. AK Baltimore handles most of our tabling gigs in NYC, but for Left Forum 2010, which took place March 19-21, I was on a plane on my way back from California, so two amazing Red Emma’s collective members and AK Baltimore supporters, Jessica Lewis and Sine Jensen, took the reins and headed up to NYC to run the AK Press table. And did a fabulous job, I must say! Here’s Jessica’s report on the event, plus some slightly blurry photos. We really should buy a digital camera for these things!)
It was that time of year again, when we dangerously overloaded a car with books and drove up to New York to that awesome epicenter of brainpower known as Left Forum.
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I’d never been before, and didn’t have a chance to actually attend any of the incredible panels that I wanted to see—like “Post-Identity Politics,” and “No More Affordable Housing Scams: Community Control of Land in New York City”—but it’s all good because instead I was getting to meet and chat with lots of AK authors like Cindy Milstein, Ben Dangl, Anthony Nocella and Josh MacPhee! Other sightings included Chris Spannos, Kevin Alexander Gray, and Noam Chomsky. Here’s a picture of Cindy with Jamie McCallum, the exhibits coordinator for Left Forum, who helped to make our experience as painless as possible!
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Pace University was packed to the rafters with about 4,000 attendees and about 90 vendors all picking over each other’s brains and tables. We were crazy busy for most of the weekend and let me tell you—C.L.R. James was the weekend’s hotness! We could not keep his books on the table!
It was great to see old friends there, like Bluestockings Radical Books in New York, and Black Sheep Books in Vermont, along with PM Press and Microcosm, the fine folks at JustSeeds and Team Colors, and we were perfectly situated next to the lovely Beehive Collective’s amazing artwork all weekend. There were so many friendly faces there, though I must say after three days of extreme over-caffeination under rather unflattering fluorescent lights, we were probably all looking a tad haggard.
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But we packed up, coffeed up and made the trip back to Baltimore in the middle of the night with a substantially lighter load and the satisfaction that the long, long weekend was a smashing success and a really good time.