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

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.

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.