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Latest Episodes:

Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More Apr 03, 2025

Show notes

Join economist Rob Larson, and Real News Network editor-in-chief Max Alvarez for a dissection of the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the billionaire class.

The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world was already common knowledge before the richest man in the world and his teenage lackeys started raiding federal offices this week.

Lists of “richest people in x country” may be easy to come by, but how much do we really know about the disgustingly wealthy who sit atop our global economic system? Who are they, really? How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains? And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions?

In this discussion with Real News Network editor Max Alvarez, economist Rob Larson will turn the weapons of class-war wielded by the elite against them—crunching the numbers on their balance sheets and combing through their fawning profiles in the Wall Street Journal so that you don’t have to. Larson will build on his book, Mastering the Universe to argue that ending corporate dominance of our society starts with stoking the fires of righteous anger by appreciating all of the sordid ways the ruling class make us miserable, break our society to pieces, and destroy the planet in their pursuit of ever-increasing power and profit.

As we behold whole continents on fire, pandemics thrashing public health system to smithereens, and declining lifespans for the vast majority, Larson and Alvarez will make the case that the only way forward is to yank on the emergency break and give capitalism the boot.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on February 12, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rob Larson is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College and author of Mastering the Univers, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley and Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom. He writes for Jacobin and Dollars & Sense, and is the House Economist for Current Affairs. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

Maximillian Alvarez is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network (TRNN) in Baltimore. He is the founder and co-host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," and the author of The Work of Living, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of COVID-19. Prior to joining TRNN, he was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review. He is a columnist for In These Times, and his writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and as an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The New Republic, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, and more.

Social Work, Racial Capitalism and the Struggle for Abolition Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

Join the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work in collaboration with Haymarket Books for a conversation about the intersections and entanglements of social work and racial capitalism, and how they can shape struggles for abolition. This will be the first in a two part series geared towards the social work community deepening our understanding and praxis in struggling against racial capitalism and for care, interdepence, and collective safety and wellbeing. This first event will explore racial capitalism and its hold on social work and other caring professions, and how this analysis can shape our struggles and movements.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on February 5, 2025.***

Speakers:

Mimi Abramovitz, Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy, Emerita, Silberman School of Social Work, Hunter College, and The Graduate Center, City University of New York received her MSW in Community Organizing and her DSW in Social Policy, both from Columbia University School of Social Work. Her research interests include the US welfare state, poverty, inequality, activism, Neoliberalism, and Managerialism--all viewed through the lens of race, class, gender, and history. Widely published in social work and often interviewed by the print and broadcast media, she is the author of 90 plus articles and four books, including Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. She is currently writing Gendered Obligations: The History of Activism Among Black and White Working-Class Women Since 1900. She has received more than 19 awards, most recently an Honorary Doctorate from Lund University, Sweden, 2023; The Lifetime Award for Excellence (Hunter College, 2022)/ and the Significant Lifetime Achievement Award ( CSWE 2018 ).

Dr. Kirk “Jae” James is an immigrant, formerly incarcerated black man committed to creating a world in which everyone can self-actualize. Jae is currently a Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the DSW program at NYU Silver School of Social Work. He also sits on the editorial board of the journal Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work. Jae has authored numerous academic articles and book chapters; and speaks internationally on mass incarceration, anti-oppression, human rights, trauma, abolition praxis, and liberatory pedagogy. He has written and shared his lived experience and research with HuffPost, the Jamaican Gleaner, Truth Out, Forbes Magazine, and Bloomberg news. Jae also leads NYU Silver's Evolving Justice — an educational initiative to build community, co-create brave spaces, and facilitate various dialogue(s) toward the emancipatory exploration of justice in theory and action. Jae was inducted into the inaugural Alumni Hall of Fame at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice in 2018. In addition, he is a recipient of the 2020 New York University Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award. Jae is completing his first book, titled 94A6325: Coming of Age In The Era of Mass Incarceration, which is a reflection and amalgamation of his lived experience and research within carceral systems.

Born in South Africa and raised in the United States, Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is most interested in the activism and visions of liberation of poor and working-class women of color. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, the inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize, a former Fulbright Fellow, a member of the Society of American Historians, and a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar. Nadasen has been involved in grassroots social justice organizing for many decades and has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Most recently she published Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba.

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. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Intervention Group at Columbia School of Social Work and was an Associate Director at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. 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).

Charity, Control, or Solidarity? Reclaiming "Care" as Revolutionary Praxis Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

We often talk about the various ways in which the state, nonprofits, and service providers coopt abolitionist demands for "care" to justify their own repressive and reformist agendas. But even within leftist spaces, we think about care work in terms of survival, not in terms of ensuring that marginalized communities can actually thrive. So there is a need for greater clarity and specificity even in our own organizing communities around care work: what kind of care are we talking about and to what ends?

Imprisoned abolitionist, Stevie Wilson and Dr. Joy James discuss what care is, how we avoid performing a version of care that is based on exploitation or infantilization, and how we can ensure care work is instead rooted in a revolutionary praxis of solidarity.

Support 9971's Work Behind the Walls: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-99...

9971 engages imprisoned people through study and discussion. We provide mutual aid that creates and sustains community behind the walls.

For more info check out In the Belly: https://abolitioniststudy.com/

Speakers:

Stevie Wilson (he/him) is a currently imprisoned Black queer abolitionist organizer and facilitator from Philadelphia. Wilson is the founder of the inside abolitionist study collective 9971 and is the founder of the abolitionist journal In the Belly. He is a columnist for the Abolitionist, a newspaper published by Critical Resistance, and a recipient of the Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket Books.

Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, is a political philosopher who works with organizers. She is editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader; Imprisoned Intellectuals; The New Abolitionistsand co-editor of The Black Feminist Reader. James's recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her 2024 edited books with Pluto include: Beyond Cop Cities and ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures.

Protecting Journalism against Rising Fascist and Ethnonationalist Threats Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

International journalist and author Rula Jebreal is currently facing criminal prosecution in Italy for her tweets re PM Meloni’s weaponization of language from the Nazi’s great replacement conspiracy theory, as well as her tweet about Fabio Rampelli’s involvement in a fascist rally (Rampelli is vice president of Italy’s parliament, and a mentor of prime minister Giorgia Meloni).

As The Coalition For Women In Journalism notes, “Jebreal has been a vocal critic of the neo-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party and Israel’s apartheid, military occupation and has faced years of threats, intimidation, surveillance, and smear campaigns.”

Press freedom organizations have documented increasing risks to journalists, especially those working in Palestine, exposing war crimes and Palestinian journalists who challenge ethnonationalism and fascism globally.

Join journalists Rula Jebreal, Naomi Klein, and Nermeen Shaikh for a timely discussion of these critical challenges, and how we can build solidarity with journalists—and others—working on the front lines.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 29, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rula Jebreal is an award-winning international journalist. Jebreal serves on the G7 gender-based violence advisory council and currently is a visiting professor at The University of Miami, where she teaches Communications (course title “Propaganda and Genocides”).

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and columnist with The Guardian and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her newest book is the New York Times-bestseller Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, now out in paperback.

Nermeen Shaikh is a co-host and senior producer at the independent television news hour Democracy Now! based in New York City. She is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power and serves on the Board of Directors of the Nobel Women's Initiative

LA Burning: Capitalism, Climate Change, and Resistance Apr 01, 2025

Show notes

A combustible combination of capitalist development, climate change, and neoliberal policies transformed normal patterns of wind and fire into an inferno that has laid waste to whole sections of LA. This human made disaster has had devastating impacts particularly on the city’s multiracial working class. Join this Spectre Live event to discuss the roots of the killer fires, collective solidarity amidst it, and what must be done to prevent future climate catastrophes.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 28, 2025.***

Speakers:

Dan Boscov-Ellen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and associate web editor for Spectre. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Critical Climate Ethics: Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis.

Maga Miranda is a community-engaged researcher, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Pomona College, and a member of the Spectre Editorial Board. She is working on a book entitled Domestic Codes: Latina Workers and the Data-Driven Politics of Care.

Promise Li is a socialist from Hong Kong and Los Angeles. He is a member of Tempest Collective and Solidarity and has been active in higher-education rank-and-file union work, international solidarity and anti-war campaigns, and Chinatown tenant organizing.

Abby Cunniff is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz and is working on a dissertation, entitled, Prison Labor in the Wild: the Invisible Infantry of California Nature, which examines how incarcerated people are exploited to fight fires, construct roads, restore habitats, and build park infrastructure.

Joshua Frank is the managing editor at CounterPunch. He is a Southern California-based investigative journalist and author of the recent award-winning book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal.

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like Apr 01, 2025

Show notes

Join Rebecca Carroll in conversation with Donika Kelly and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein as they discuss and celebrate the newly imagined edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like.

The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Barbara Neely, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world. The new contributors carry the torch of the original interviewees’ lives and words with heart, rigor, gratitude, and radical imagination, illuminating how these conversations are about more than just writing—they are about life, relationships, joy, gratitude, wellness, and self-preservation.

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.

"Thirty years ago, Rebecca Carroll curated an astonishing collection of voices, and it is a gift to now be immersed in a lively dialogue between those remarkable trailblazers and a new generation of Black women who have been shaped by their words, wisdom and radical vision."

—Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 16, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and host of the podcasts Come Through with Rebecca Carroll: 15 conversations about race in a pivotal year for America and the award-winning Billie Was a Black Woman. Rebecca’s writing has been published widely, and her critically acclaimed memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, has been optioned by Killer Films with Rebecca attached to write and develop for episodic TV. She is the creator, curator, and executive producer of In Love and Struggle, a live and audio event series that centers the lived experiences of Black women and nonbinary people through monologues, music, and humor. The series is a co-production with The Meteor media collective, where Rebecca serves as Editor-at-Large.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bes- tiary. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She cur- rently lives in Iowa City, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate pro- fessor of physics and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The Disor- dered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred. Her next books, The Edge of Space-Time and The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic, are forthcoming from Pantheon Books and Duke University Press, respectively.

Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice Apr 01, 2025

Show notes

Join longtime organizers and authors Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam in conversation with Harsha Walia on ways to deepen solidarity with migrant sex workers.

In Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on November 26, 2024.***

Speakers:

Chanelle Gallant is an author, activist, and movement strategist who has worked in the areas of sexuality and criminalization for over two decades. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, most recently the New York Times best-seller Pleasure Activism, Beyond Survival, and Defund, Disarm, Dismantle, and her work has been discussed in the Washington Post, the Advocate, Esquire, Vice, and every national media outlet in Canada. Chanelle is on the national board for Showing Up For Racial Justice and has helped to found or support numerous sex worker organizations. She has an MA in sociology and was a Lambda Literary Fellow.

Elene Lam is an activist, artist, community organizer, educator, and human rights defender. She has fought for sex worker, migrant, gender, labor, and racial justice for over twenty years. She is the founder of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the co-founder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has used diverse and innovative approaches to advocate social justice for migrant sex workers, such as leadership building and community mobilization. She holds a master’s of law and master’s of social work. She is a PhD candidate at McMaster University (School of Social Work) and is studying the harm of the anti-trafficking movement. She was awarded the Constance E. Hamilton Award for Women’s Equality by the City of Toronto.

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women's Memorial March Committee.

We Grow The World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition Mar 31, 2025

Show notes

Join Dorothy Roberts, Harsha Walia, Kim Wilson, and Maya Schenwar for a virtual book launch and conversation on caregiving, abolition, and hope amid chaos!

As we await a second Trump presidency, it's easy to feel frozen -- as if any action we take can't possibly be enough, and may be futile. Now is a moment to bring in the stories of folks who are taking action to build a liberatory world every day, sometimes in ways that go completely unrecognized: caregivers. In this heavy time, it's important to recognize the centrality of care to movement work. In their new anthology, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson have drawn together the insights of a wide range of authors and organizers, including Dorothy Roberts, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Beth Richie, Harsha Walia, Dylan Rodriguez, Victoria Law, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, and many more. Together, these essays illuminate the ways in which caregiving and struggles for liberation intertwine, offering both transformative ideas and practical tools for building new worlds even in the direst of circumstances.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on November 20, 2024.***

Speakers:

Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and board president at Truthout. She is the coauthor (with Victoria Law) of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms and the author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. Maya is also the coeditor (with Joe Macaré and Alana YuLan Price) of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and numerous other publications. Maya is a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and organizes with the Love & Protect collective. She lives in Chicago with her partner, child, and abolitionist cat.

Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the cofounder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee.

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and biopolitics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing Mar 31, 2025

Show notes

Join Rebecca Vilkomerson, Rabbi Alissa Wise, Omar Barghouti, Nyle Fort and Stefanie Fox as they discuss the new book Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing

The book asks What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part?

Against the backdrop of rapid and often devastating political developments, Solidarity is the Political Version of Love explores how JVP grew larger as the organization shifted to the left and helped to alter the public narrative about Palestinian liberation, while also navigating the tensions of organization-building and creating a space for Judaism liberated from Zionism. Their insights help contextualize the intense suppression of activism for Palestinian freedom, while illuminating the roots of today’s flourishing Jewish solidarity with Palestinians worldwide.

In addressing their shortcomings and failures no less than their inspiring successes, Vilkomerson and Wise deliver an account of JVP’s organizing during the 2010s that offers crucial strategic lessons for anyone engaging in the collective work of building organizations and fighting for justice as our movements evolve over time.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on September 26, 2024.***

Speakers:

Rebecca Vilkomerson has worked in social justice movement building for several decades, as an organizer, fundraiser, organizational development consultant and strategist. From 2009-2019 she was the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2022, the Solidaire Network published her report “Funding Freedom: Building Support for the Palestinian Freedom Movement in Philanthropy.” She is currently the Co-Director of the Funding Freedom project.

Rabbi Alissa Wise is an organizational consultant, community organizer, educator, and ritual leader with over two decades of movement-building experience. Rabbi Wise co-founded the JVP Rabbinical Council in 2010. From 2011-2021 was Organizing Co-Director, Deputy Director and Interim Co-Executive Director of JVP. She is currently the Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire which she founded in October 2023.

Omar Barghouti is a co-founder of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award. He holds a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, NY, and is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy (ethics) at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of, BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket: 2011). His commentaries and views have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, among others.

Stefanie Fox (she/her) is the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a U.S. based, grassroots membership organization mobilizing Jewish communities into the movement for Palestinian rights and freedom and towards a vision of Judaism beyond Zionism. Stefanie joined JVP in 2009 as the organization’s first National Organizer, and played multiple roles over the past 15 years growing the organization into the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. Prior to joining JVP, Stefanie spent a decade in racial and economic justice work as a grassroots community organizer, public health practitioner, and policy researcher and analyst. She has written extensively for print media with publications in outlets like Time, Boston Review, The Nation, and has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, CNN, and more.

Nyle Fort is a minister, organizer, and scholar. He is currently an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

Country Queers Mar 25, 2025

Show notes

Join Rae Garringer and special guests Neema Avashia, Kijana West, and David Rodriguez for a virtual launch and celebration of Country Queers: A Love Letter.

Part photo book, part memoir, part oral history project, this volume paints a vivid portrait of queer and trans experiences in rural areas and small towns across the US.

After years as a DIY, minimally funded, community-based oral history project, the work now takes a new form in Country Queers: A Love Letter—a book of full-color photos and interviews with rural folks from Mississippi to New Mexico and beyond, with Garringer’s account as traveler and interviewer woven through the pages. In these intimate conversations, we see how queerness—shaped, as all things are, by race, class, gender, and more—moves in rural and small-town spaces, spotlighting how country queers make sense of their lives through reflections on land, home, community, and belonging. While media-driven myths suggest that big cities are the only places queer folks can find love and community, Country Queers resists that trope by centering rural queer and trans stories of the joys, challenges, monotony, and nuances of their lives, in their own words.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on October 8, 2024.***

Speakers:

Neema Avashia is a West Virginian-born Indian American who writes about her identity, culture, and politics. She is the author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place.

Rae Garringer is a writer, oral historian, audio producer, and goat farmer based in southeastern West Virginia, where they were raised. They are the author and editor of Country Queers: A Love Letter.

Kijana West is the founder of Safe Space Cumberland, a home for the LGBTQIA+ family in Cumberland, MD working in intersectional partnership with other historically marginalized communities.

David Rodriguez is a goat farmer from Lane City, Texas. He and his husband run Country Q's: a goat milk soap company.

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2439-country-queers

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2gY7BWTkF4

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