The stories we tell one another have an enormous impact on what we see as possible, what we strive to create, and what we know to resist. The speculative fiction landscape is changing. Margaret Killjoy, on tour with her new anarchist, punk fantasy novella The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (tor.com, out on August 15) will join Baltimore native author K.M. Szpara for a reading and discussion.

“More Than a Fraction” takes you on a journey with the Fraction family including two brothers, Thomas and Othello, their service in the Civil War, and their subsequent fight after the war for rights and inclusion. Dr. Moseley-Hobbs is the 3rd great-granddaughter of Thomas Fraction. Her passion for education and history led to her uncovering hidden stories and forgotten legacies.

That education should instill and nurture democracy is an American truism. Yet organizations such as the Business Roundtable, together with conservative philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Walmart’s owners, the Waltons, have been turning public schools into corporate mills. Their top-down programs, such as Common Core State Standards, track, judge, and homogenize the minds of millions of American students from kindergarten through high school. But corporate funders would not be able to implement this educational control without the de facto partnership of government at all levels, channeling public moneys into privatization initiatives, school closings, and high-stakes testing that discourages independent thinking.

Educational Justice offers hope that there’s still time to take on corporatized schools and build democratic alternatives. Forcefully written by educator and journalist Howard Ryan, with contributing authors, the book deconstructs the corporate assault on schools, assesses the prevailing teachers union responses, and documents best teaching and organizing practices. Reports from various educational fronts include innovative union strategies against charter school expansion, as well as teaching visions drawn from the social justice and whole language traditions. Bold, informative, clearly reasoned, this book is an education in itself—a democratic one at that.

The world’s first independent black republic, Haiti was forged in the fire of history’s only successful slave revolution. Yet more than two hundred years later, the full promise of the revolution—a free country and a free people—remains unfulfilled. In this moving and detailed history, Michael Deibert, who has spent two decades reporting on Haiti, chronicles the heroic struggles of Haitians to build their longed-for country in the face of overwhelming odds. Based on years of interviews with Haitian political leaders, international diplomats, peasant advocates, gang leaders, and hundreds of ordinary Haitians, Deibert’s book provides a vivid, complex, and challenging analysis of Haiti’s recent history.

Behind the smiling faces of cashiers, wait staff, and workers of all sorts, a war is going on, usually without the knowledge of official political and labor organizations. Guerrillas of Desire maps these undercurrents, documenting the history of everyday resistance under slavery, in peasant life, and throughout modern capitalism, while showing that it remains an important factor in revolution and something radicals of all stripes must understand. Join the author for a reading and discussion.

We're thrilled to welcome critical philosopher Michael Hardt on September 6th for a discussion of his new book, Assembly, co-authored with Italian autonomist thinker, Antonio Negri. With the rise of right-wing political parties in many countries, the question of how to organize democratically and effectively has become increasingly urgent. Although today's leaderless political organizations are not sufficient, a return to traditional, centralized forms of political leadership is neither desirable nor possible. Instead, as Hardt and Negri argue, familiar roles must be reversed: leaders should be responsible for short-term, tactical action, but it is the multitude that must drive strategy. In other words, if these new social movements are to achieve meaningful revolution, they must invent effective modes of assembly and decision-making structures that rely on the broadest democratic base. In the present moment, the call to radically rethink the politics of assembly is a welcome invitation. Don't miss this important conversation!

Kate Wagner's McMansionHell blog, fresh off a fair-use legal challenge from Zillow, is a brutally snarky but deeply informed attack on the aesthetics of the US housing market, tearing down the shoddy design choices of the "McMansion"—and the logic of pointless accumulation behind it that inflates housing bubbles and produces the space of suburban neoliberalism. Kate is also the communications chair for the Baltimore chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the quickly growing and refreshingly non-sectarian socialist organization that's working to make electoral socialism a threat again by supporting candidates like khalid kamau.

Come for the shit-talking of the bad houses of the rich, stay for the critique of neoliberalism and discussion of how we build power to roll it back!

Talk starts at 7:30, but we'll be hosting a special democratic socialism happy hour with DSA starting at 6:30. 

Join us as we welcome local author Kenneth Rogers to present his new book, "Heroes, Villains, and Healing"- a guide to help male survivors of childhood sexual abuse understand and heal from the trauma of their past using comic book superheroes and villains. The book was written to help male survivors open up about their abuse, seek help, and stop suppressing their trauma through drug and alcohol abuse, or suicide.

Red Emma’s is thrilled to welcome to Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Radical Technologies argues that the new technologies transfiguring our lives come at a great cost. From smartphones, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality to cryptocurrency, 3D-printing and the “smart city,” Adam forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.

The story of the little neighborhood of Stone Hill starts with the emergence of Baltimore as a major port; the voracious need for canvas in the age of sail; the assemblage of capital to harness water power, build mills, install machinery; and to construct housing for the workers who operated that machinery. These forces also swept jobs away as synthetics created new challenges and spinning and weaving moved South. Guy Hollyday understands and tells the big story of Stone Hill from early in the 20th century through a series of changes that influenced the community, including the boom years of the World Wars, the privation of the Depression, and the closing of the mills in 1972. Trains chugged along Stony Run, and then they didn't. Open fields became houses. One by one small grocery stores opened, one by one they closed. The oldest interviewees remember a period of company-owned housing, no indoor plumbing, and ill-heated, crowded houses. Guy Hollyday is an old-timer in a neighborhood that continues to evolve. In the 21 years since the publication of the first edition of this book, Stone Hill has continued to change, to grow more affluent, and more a part of the city as the old mills along the Jones Falls Valley are converted to apartments, offices, artist studios, and restaurants...

Black women have a long history of using humor to fight oppression.  Join the Black Ladies Brunch Collective for a celebration of joy as resistance, and hear poems on sexuality, Prince and Harriet Tubman from our first collection, Not Without Our Laughter.

The Black Ladies Brunch Collective is a group of Black women poets dedicated to building celebratory spaces for us, and by us. Collective members include Saida Agostini, Anya Creightney, Teri Cross Davis,  celeste doaks, Tafisha Edwards, and Katy Richey.