Join us for an event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, as Silky Shah is joined by historian Charlotte E. Rosen for a conversation on Shah’s book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.

Co-sponsored by Organized Communities Against Deportations, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago and Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.

Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings.

Shah and Rosen will explore how to bridge the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, and now serves as its executive director. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge and in the edited volumes, The Jail is Everywhere (Verso, 2024), Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.

Charlotte E. Rosen is a historian and writer based in Chicago. She is also the Programming and Events Coordinator at Haymarket Books.

Order Unbuild Walls: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2213-unbuild-walls

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

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. In America, América Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates that the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.

Pick up a copy of America, América here: http://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780593831250

Speakers:

Greg Grandin is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. The End of the Myth won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the prize in History. Other books include Empire’s Workshop, revised and expanded in 2021, and Kissinger’s Shadow. He is also the author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History.

Esther Allen is a writer, translator, and professor at Baruch College and City University of New York Graduate Center. She edited, translated and annotated the Selected Writings of José Martí (Penguin Classics). Her translation of Zama, the 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, won the 2017 National Translation Award. Her most recent book, a translation of Di Benedetto’s 1969 novel The Suicides, came out earlier this year.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAko46HvZSQ

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join the editors of No Cop City, No Cop World for a panel discussion on the fight for police abolition and for a livable planet for all.

The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. No Cop City, No Cop World is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.

Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.

Order a copy of No Cop City, No Cop World here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2541-no-cop-city-no-cop-world

Speakers:

Micah Herskind is an organizer, writer, and law student who is active in abolitionist movements against police and jail expansion.

Kamau Franklin (he/him) is the founder of Community Movement Builders. He’s been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years.

Mariah Parker is an emcee and labor organizer born and raised in the South. Their cultural work and organizing have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, SPIN, Al Jazeera, Scalawag and Hammer & Hope.

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender-nonconforming people for the past four decades. She is cofounder of Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of more than 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender-nonconforming people. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub, she works with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and invest in strategies that will create safer communities. Ritchie is co-author, with Mariame Kaba, of No More Police. She is a nationally recognized researcher, policy analyst, and expert on policing and criminalization. Ritchie lives in Detroit, Michigan.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0RdtGIxVgk

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

The US military build up in the Caribbean and its aggression towards Venezuela are part of the Trump regime’s strategy of renewed American dominance and interventionism in the Western Hemisphere. Join Center for Political Education, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, and Haymarket Books for an important conversation on the new “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and how US imperialism threatens to bring war and economic instability across the region.

Speakers:

Marisol LeBrón is an Associate Professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching focus on social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021).

Jorge E. Cuéllar is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on the histories, politics, and daily life of modern Central America. At present, he is finishing his first book titled, Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador (Duke UP), a grounded study of the Central American nation's postwar to "post-postwar" transition. Cuéllar is appointed Assistant Professor of Central American Studies in the Department of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College and is a member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Editorial Committee.

Alex Aviña is Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University (ASU). His research focuses on twentieth-century Mexico, with an emphasis on revolutionary movements, the Mexican Left, state violence and terrorism, immigration, and the history of narcotics production and trafficking.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School, and Center for Political Education.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/GehPn9o3_cQ

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us for a conversation with local organizers about how our community pushed back against attacks on our neighbors from federal border patrol agents last fall.

Over the course of several months, more than 250 Border Patrol agents were flown into Illinois to assist ICE in carrying out warrantless arrests and racially targeted sweeps. Community organizations documented at least 615 people who were unlawfully detained — a number expected to grow as additional cases are reviewed.

Although this particular surge force has since left Illinois, federal officials have made it clear that similar operations are likely to return. That makes it essential to take stock of what happened here, how our communities responded in real time, and what it means for the months ahead.

Speakers include Rey Wences from Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Antonio Gutierrez from Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) and Illinois State Senator Celina Villanueva, with a special poetry reading from Juliet DeJesus Alejandre.

This event is cosponsored by ICIRR, OCAD and Haymarket Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/OJ4Kk4yARb4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join David Omotoso Stovall and Tara Betts as they discuss Stovall's latest book Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago. Marginalized communities often become understandably preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem them disposable, making it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hyper-segregation, and dispossession. Under these impossible circumstances people are often quicker to punch each other before they identify the enemy as white supremacy and capitalism, creating a society where conflict is engineered.

Examining the long fight of Black people in Chicago to claim their humanity and thrive in a city while facing school closings, the destruction of public housing and oppressive law enforcement, Stovall argues that marginalized communities face unique structural challenges while being blamed for interpersonal conflict and labeled “violent” and deemed disposable. With a novel approach to the question of how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impacts low-income communities, Engineered Conflict uses examples from Chicago’s recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability through housing instability, criminalization, and school closures. Looking at all three phenomena together allows readers to see how state policies designate some neighborhoods as unviable, where disinvestment furthers a rationale to contain members of these communities.

Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population. --------------------------------------------------------------

Speakers:

David Omotoso Stovall is a professor in the Department of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation and the Politics of Interruption.

Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and Arc & Hue. She is a professor in the Peace, Conflict Studies, and Social Justice program at DePaul University and part of the faculty at the Solstice MFA program at Lasell University. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including This is the Honey, Choice Words, and The Overturning. Her short stories and essays have also appeared in numerous publications, including Octavia's Brood, Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, and The Breakbeat Poets.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZttfgSzf46I

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

It's clear, at this late hour of the climate crisis, that nothing short of revolution in some form can salvage the possibility of global justice. It's equally clear that a mere climate or climate-justice movement can't do this alone. What's required is not simply a more powerful "climate left" but a far more powerful left--a resurgent, revolutionary left--for which the total defeat of fascism and of fossil capital are understood as inseparable. Everything the left has fought for is now at stake.

Join Haymarket Books and Verso Books for an urgent conversation about climate catastrophe and the left, featuring:

Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, co-authors of The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It's Too Late

Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism

Host: Wen Stephenson, climate-justice correspondent for The Nation and author of Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe

Speakers:

Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode. His latest book, with Andreas Malm, is The Long Heat.

Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of several acclaimed books, such as, with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. His book How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an international bestseller and has been turned into a feature film. His latest book, with Wim Carton, is The Long Heat.

Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left. She is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Her publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Global Environmental Politics, World Politics, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as in media outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, n+1, Dissent, and more.

Wen Stephenson is the climate-justice correspondent for The Nation and a frequent contributor to The Baffler.. An independent journalist, essayist, and activist, he is the author of, most recently, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe (Haymarket, 2025). His previous book, What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other (Beacon, 2015), is a personal account of the pivotal early years of the US climate-justice movement. He has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Verso Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/ppW3UEaFGA0

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Dr. Rebecca Hall and Kyle T. Mays as they discuss and celebrate the new edition of Negro Liberation, a major work in the Black Communist tradition by worker-intellectual Harry Haywood.

In 1948, Harry Haywood, a leading member of the Communist Party USA, published Negro Liberation, a pathbreaking book that lays out his argument that the Black Belt South constitutes a distinct nation and an internal colony of U.S. imperialism. Applying a Marxist-Leninist lens to questions of nationalism, colonialism, and land distribution, Haywood lays out the dire stakes of Jim Crow violence and oppression and critiques the emptiness and insufficiency of liberal solutions. Along the way, he makes a powerful case for Black self-determination.

Framed by Rebecca Hall’s moving meditation on her father’s legacy and Charisse Burden-Stelly’s clear-eyed case for how Haywood reveals the contradiction between ruling-class politics and Black liberation today, this new edition of Negro Liberation is a must-read for anyone fighting against oppression.

Order the book here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2616-negro-liberation

More on Wake Productions: https://www.rebhallphd.org/

Speakers:

Rebecca Hall, JD PhD is an independent scholar, activist, and educator. Her paternal grandparents were born enslaved and she is the daughter of Harry Haywood. Dr. Hall writes and publishes on the history of race, gender, law, and resistance as well as articles on climate justice and intersectional feminist theory. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College, Berkeley Law, and University of Santa Cruz. Her most recent book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Simon & Schuster, 2021) has won multiple awards, and was a finalist for the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards and the Pen America Open Book Award. Wake has been listed as a Best Book of 2021 by NPR and The Washington Post, Forbes, Ms. Magazine, and has been released in eight languages. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2022-23) The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Stanford Humanities Center 2023-24). Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships.

Kyle T. Mays (he/him) is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar. He is a Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History and the Associate Vice Provost of Inclusive Excellence at UCLA. In 2024 he was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of five books, including When We Are Kin: The History and Future of Afro-Indigenous Solidarity (Haymarket, 2026), Rethinking the Red Power Movement with Sam Hitchmough (Routledge, 2024), City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021), and Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018).

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/pNL0AZDbuBE

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Harsha Walia, Silky Shah, and Beatrice Adler-Bolton of Death Panel for an urgent discussion on the brutal enforcement of immigration policing in Minneapolis and beyond, and why resistance calls for the abolition of much more than ICE.

With at least 6 people dying in immigration detention in January 2026 alone, and following the executions of Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and Keith Porter Jr. at the hands of ICE agents, the call to abolish ICE can be heard across the US. In this conversation, co-hosted by Haymarket Books and Death Panel, thinkers and organisers Walia, Shah, and Adler-Bolton will discuss the realities of immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation; the history of ICE and the US border regime; and the many ways people can - and do - resist.

Remember that you can download three crucial e-books on migrant justice for free from Haymarket here, including Shah’s Unbuild Walls and Walia’s Border & Rule: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/525-free-ebooks-abolish-ice-abolish-the-border

Speakers:

Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the U.S. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024). She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison-industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over 20 years.

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Border and Rule (Haymarket Books, 2021) and Undoing Border Imperialism (AK, 2013). 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.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton is an author, disability and mad justice agitator, and theorist of debility, care, class struggle, and the state. She is the cohost of the Death Panel Podcast about the political economy of health, and the coauthor of the books Health Communism (Verso 2022) and All Care for All People (forthcoming from Haymarket). She is based in South Minneapolis and has struggled and organized against occupation by ICE and CBP with comrades and neighbors since "Operation Metro Surge" descended on the Twin Cities in early December 2025.

This event is organized by Haymarket Books and Death Panel.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/d9YJqx1zY2c

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join four left Venezuelan voices for an urgent discussion of the neocolonial US intervention and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro on January 3 and its aftermath. The event will examine the evolution of the Bolivarian process and its neoliberal turn under Maduro, along with the weakening of the social forces within Venezuela capable of resisting imperialist invasion. As the situation changes rapidly, speakers will also assess the post-invasion configuration under Delcy Rodríguez, the collaboration with U.S. imperial power, oil concessions, and the consolidation of a “Madurismo without Maduro.”

The discussion will challenge both pro-invasion narratives and apologetics for the Venezuelan state, advancing a left, anti-imperialist critique rooted in sovereignty, democracy, and working-class self-determination.

Speakers:

Simón Rodríguez is a Venezuelan socialist writer and journalist. He was a student organizer and later became professor at the Universidad de los Andes. When he was a member of the national leadership of the Socialism and Freedom Party, he ran as a candidate for the National Assembly in 2015. He is a founding member of Laclase.info and Venezuelanvoices.org and has published articles in Humania del Sur, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Arab, and Rebelión and on dozens of electronic outlets, and his articles have been translated into six languages. He has given talks and lectures in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He is coauthor with Miguel Sorans of the book Why Did Chavismo Fail? A Left-Opposition Balance Sheet (CeHUS, 2018).

Emiliano Terán is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela and has a master’s degree in ecological economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a PhD candidate in environmental science and technology at the same institution. He is also an associate researcher at the Center for Development Studies in Venezuela and a member of the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela

Gonzalo Gómez was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party from the 1970s to the 1990s. He was a key figure in the regroupment of Trotskyism in Venezuela and was a critical supporter of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. He participated in the Popular Revolutionary Assembly against the 2002 coup. Gómez also was a cofounder of the alternative media site Aporrea. He was one of the founders of Marea Socialista, a current that joined the PSUV, of which he was a founding delegate and part of the regional leadership in Caracas. In 2014, Marea was excluded from the PSUV and then broke with the Maduro government. Gómez participated for several years with the Citizen’s Platform for the Defense of the Constitution with several former Chávez ministers. Gómez has continued to organize with Marea Socialista as an independent organization and section of the International Socialist League.

Yoletty Bracho is a Venezuelan political science researcher currently teaching at the University of Avignon in south of France who studies authoritarian governance and popular mobilization in Venezuela.

Moderator:

Anderson Bean is a sociology professor at North Carolina A&T State University, as well as a North Carolina–based activist and editor. He is a contributor and editor of the book Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives, out this month from Haymarket Books, and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Lexington Books)

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/cOe2ZWX7f8M

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2604-venezuela-in-crisis

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org