A Radical Guide has teamed up with PM Press to document and film the panels at the 6th Annual Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco, California!
The Howard Zinn Book Fair is on Sunday, December 8, 2019, 10 am-6 pm. A Radical Guide will be there documenting several panels at the Howard Zinn Book Fair.
The Howard Zinn Book Fair is an annual celebration of people’s history, past, present, and future. We gather together authors, zinesters, bloggers, and publishers for a day of readings, panel discussions, and workshops exploring the value of dissident histories towards building a better future. In the spirit of the late historian Howard Zinn, we recognize the stories of the ways that everyday people have risen to propose a world beyond empires big and small. The Howard Zinn Book Fair is a non-sectarian left event that welcomes a wide variety of political traditions left traditions.
Here is a list of the panels hosted by PM Press with an indication of which panels A Radical Guide will cover at the event. 
Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom with Alice Bag, Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Jessica Mills, and editor John Mink.
Teaching Resistance features an active discussion with activist punk icons Alice Bag, Michelle Cruz Gonzales, and John Mink about activism, radicals, revolutionaries, and cultural subversives inside and outside the classroom. They will explore new ways to subvert educational systems and institutions, collectively transform educational spaces, and empower students and teachers alike to fight for genuine change. Punk rock and education are movements for liberation! Join this discussion with these legendary punk activists on how to harness our lives, music, organizing, and classrooms to fight for human liberation, social justice, systemic change, and true equality.
Alice Bag is a singer/songwriter, musician, author, artist, educator, and feminist. Alice was the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first bands to form during the initial wave of punk in Los Angeles, and wrote the acclaimed books “Violence Girl” and “Pipe Bomb for the Soul” about her decades of life as a punk and classroom teacher.
Yvette Felarca is a teacher and civil rights activist, a national organizer with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN).
Michelle Cruz Gonzales played drums and wrote lyrics for three bands during the 1980s and 1990s: Bitch Fight, Spitboy, and Instant Girl. Her writing has been published in anthologies, literary journals, and “Hip Mama” magazine. Michelle teaches English and creative writing at Las Positas College and lives with her husband, son, and their three Mexican dogs in Oakland, California.
Jessica Mills is a punk lifer who has played sax and bass for quite a few very well-known bands from the early nineties into the present. She is a former Maximumrocknroll columnist and author of the punk parenting memoir/guide “My Mother Wears Combat Boots”, a current MRR book reviewer, intrepid copy editor for this volume, and English instructor at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque.
Miriam Klein Stahl is a Bay Area artist, educator, and activist, and the New York Times bestselling illustrator of Rad American Women A–Z and Rad Women Worldwide. In addition to her work in printmaking, drawing, sculpture, paper-cut, and public art, she is also the co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School, where she has taught since 1995.
John Mink is a social studies teacher who has worked at the high school and adult school levels and refuses to hide his political radicalism from his students. Editor of the Maximum Rocknroll monthly column and PM Press book “Teaching Resistance” and a vocalist/bassist for several internationally recognized punk bands, John lives in Berkeley, California, with his partner Megan March, who is also his bandmate in the truewave/punk group Street Eaters.
Kadijah Means was born and raised in Oakland, California. She is the former Berkeley High School Black Student Union president and Amnesty International chapter president. She has been featured in USA Today and other publications in recognition of her role as an organizer of the thousand-strong Black Lives Matter protest in December 2014, and is now a Restorative Justice Coordinator at a public high school in Richmond, CA.
Sarah Orton, born in Oakland, is thirty years old and has been an educator, advocate, and activist in interpersonal violence and social justice movements for over seven years. She has a background in sexual health and human sexuality studies and believes that sexual violence is a public health and human rights issue.
Lindsay McLeary spent his formative years knee-deep in SoCal’s survivor-heavy punk/hardcore scene and had the peculiar distinction of being the most heavily tattooed person in the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Equity and Inclusion. He worked in education and educational outreach for well over a decade, including stints as a lecturer at the University of Southern California and Stanford and as a classroom teacher in Oakland and Richmond, California, public schools.
Frankie Mastrangelo is an educator living in Richmond, Virginia. She’s working on a Ph.D. dissertation that looks at how neoliberal buzzwords, like innovation, circulate through and influence various cultures and communities.
Ruth Crossman is a writer and educator who currently lives in Oakland. Her political writings have appeared on the website “Poets Reading the News” and in the anthology “11/9: The Downfall of American Democracy”.
Pick up a copy of Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom.
Abortion is our Right to Strike: The U.S. birth strike against the patriarchy and an app supporting global access to safe abortion information, with Jenny Brown, Allie Lahey, and Sarah Shannon.
Jenny Brown of National Women’s Liberation will discuss her book Birth Strike: The birth rate is plunging in the U.S.: It’s a spontaneous birth strike! In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing and childrearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., we just get more laws against abortion. Here, women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.
Sarah Shannon of Hesperian will discuss the Safe Abortion app: Policies criminalizing the right to reproductive health and abortion in the U.S. and globally, led Hesperian Health Guides to develop this free app. This presentation will suggest ways people and providers can go on strike against patriarchy and use the app to support people seeking safe abortion information and access in the Bay Area and beyond. A hands-on opportunity to use the app and discuss how spreading safe abortion information can help defeat efforts to prohibit reproductive health access in the U.S. and globally.
The session will be chaired by Allie Lahey of East Bay DSA.
Pick up a copy of Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work.
Parenting in the Resistance with Dan Arel, Jessica Mills, and Dani Burlison.
Parenting is hard enough, but in today’s world full of neo-Nazis, hate speech, and sexism, how do we raise our children to not get caught up in the noise and learn to take a stand against it?
Dan Arel is the author of Parenting without God (2019 PM Press), an activist, and a columnist for such sites as Salon, AlterNet, The Hill, The New Arab, and more.
Dani Burlison is an author, journalist, teacher, and editor of “All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body”.
Jessica Mills is a touring musician, artist, activist, writer, teacher, and mother. She is the author of My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us and wrote the Foreword to Parenting Without God: How to Raise Moral, Ethical, and Intelligent Children, Free from Religious Dogma, Second Edition.
Pick up a copy of Parenting without God: How to Raise Moral, Ethical, and Intelligent Children, Free from Religious Dogma, Second Edition.
George Caffentzis in Conversation
George Caffentzis, author of In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism in conversation with Delio Vasquez.
Pick up a copy of In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism.
Silvia Federici on Witches, The Commons, Reclaiming the Body and Discovering Our Power
Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant. In 1972 she was cofounder of the International Feminist Collective that launched the Wages for Housework campaign. Her books include Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women; Caliban and the Witch; Re-enchanting the World; and Revolution at Point Zero. She is a professor emerita of social sciences at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York. She worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and was also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom for Africa.
Pick up a copy of Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women.
Advertising Shits in Your Head: Strategies for Resistance with coeditor Vyvian Raoul in conversation with John Law of the Billboard Liberation Front.
Advertising Shits in Your Head is a new toolkit that calls adverts what they are—a powerful means of control through manipulation—and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. This visually striking session with coauthor Vyvian Raoul (coming from the UK!) and local Bay Area subvertiser—founding member of the Billboard Liberation Front, John Law—will diagnose the problem and offer practical tips for a DIY remedy. Faced with an ad-saturated world, activists are fighting back, equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools. Their aim is to subvert the adverts that control us. Come check out case studies from both sides of the Atlantic such as Art in Ad Places, Public Ad Campaign, Resistance Is Female, Brandalism, Special Patrol Group, photography from Luna Park and Jordan Seiler, and more! This session and book are a call-to-arts for a generation raised on adverts that offers practical solutions and guidance on how to subvert the ads. Celebrate this full-color manifesto against corporate advertising!
Vyvian Raoul is a writer and an editor at Dog Section Press.
John Law is the founder of billboard liberation front.
Pick up a copy of Advertising Shits in Your Head: Strategies for Resistance.
Angry Women Rise Up: Channeling Anger Into Action with Dani Burlison, editor of All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body, and contributors Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Airial Clark, Christine No, Ariel Erskine, and Lorelle Saxena.
Women’s anger is a powerful force and when utilized properly, it can contribute to positive changes in our communities. This panel discussion centers around the upcoming PM Press anthology “All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body,” and will focus on not only the reasons women are angry but how women can rise up and channel that anger into solidarity and positive social change. How do we center the stories of women of color, trans women, poor women, sex workers, disabled women, etc in today’s feminist movement? What kind of impact does oppression have on our bodies? How do we work together and protect one another and challenge the systems meant to keep us down? How do we take care of ourselves during the current attempt at rollbacks on women’s rights? We’ll discuss all of this and more in this lively panel full of inspiring women!
Dani Burlison: author, journalist, teacher, editor of “All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body”
Michelle Gonzales: writer, college professor, musician Airial Clark: educator, writer, workshop facilitator for “How To Be A Woman And Not Give A Fuck”
Christine No: writer, poet, editor, film producer
Ariel Erskine: writer, filmmaker, musician
Lorelle Saxena: acupuncturist, writer, musician
Pick up a copy of All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body
STRIKE: A Musical Slide Performance by Eric Drooker, author and artist of Slingshot: 40 Postcards by Eric Drooker.
Visual artist Eric Drooker will give a musical slide lecture, projecting hundreds of his well-known provocative images. When the IWW commissioned him to design their famous General Strike poster, the artist delivered it to them in over 20 languages. Drooker will also explore his years as a street artist in New York City, the role of art in culture and politics, and his eventual infiltration of the mainstream. The slide presentation will feature the artist on a variety of musical instruments and will celebrate the new edition of his book, Slingshot: 40 Postcards by Eric Drooker.
Eric Drooker‘s drawings and posters are a familiar sight in the global street art movement, and his paintings appear frequently on the covers of the New Yorker. Born and raised in New York City, he began to slap his images on the streets as a teenager. Drooker’s reputation as a social critic has grown over the years and has led to countless editorial illustrations for the Nation, the New York Times, the Progressive, etc. His newest work is the re-release of Slingshot: 40 Postcards by Eric Drooker (PM Press, 2019). www.Drooker.com
Pick up a copy of Slingshot: 40 Postcards by Eric Drooker
Strikes, Class Struggle and Choke Points with Immanuel Ness, editor of New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism, and Gifford Hartman and Robert Ovetz.
The dispersed system of global production, united by supply chains stretching across the planet, has not only integrated our world but made capitalism more vulnerable to disruption. The tap of smartphones brings goods and services to us instantly, as work increasingly recomposes into more precarious, unstable, and temporary forms of employment. Yet capitalist production is being challenged with more frequent and militant work stoppages, like sick-ins by federal workers and wildcat strikes by teachers. Earlier mass and general strikes exploited choke points and effectively paralyzed production. Drawing on these histories, we will brainstorm ways cross-sectoral solidarity might follow workers, goods, and services up and down production chains. We will examine the link between local workplaces and factories abroad, as well as how commodities from just-in-time fulfillment centers (like Amazon’s) are delivered to our doors by gig economy subcontractors—a system woven together by academics, logistics planners, and tech workers who design and maintain it. Our workshop will identify and map potential choke points, exposing vulnerabilities where struggles could possibly circulate globally through acts of working-class solidarity.
Immanuel Ness is the author of many books on global working-class struggle including Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (co-editor with Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Pluto 2018). Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto 2015). He is co-editor of the Journal of Labor and Society and a Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
Gifford Hartman, of the Bay Area-based Global Supply Chain Study/Research Group (https://libcom.org/blog/empire-logistics), is an adult educator, labor trainer, working-class historian; he’s been a rank-and-file militant in the ILWU and IWW. He has helped organize training, workshops, and conferences on international cross-sectoral working-class solidarity in a dozen locations worldwide, from the railroad hub of Chicago to the Pearl River Delta of China.
Robert Ovetz is the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Brill 2018 & Haymarket 2019) and editor of the forthcoming Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Tactics, Strategies, Objectives (Pluto, 2020). Robert is on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Labor and Society and a Lecturer in Political Science at a university in the San Francisco Bay Area. Follow him @OvetzRobert
Pick up a copy of New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism
Working Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song with Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore, coeditors and composers of Working-Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song: A Songbook and CD.
Celebrated musicians, bandleaders, and authors Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore will sing songs from the brand new album Working-Class Heroes, a collection of American working-class, pre–World War II folk songs revived for new audiences. In this session, the duo will perform songs written by both by folk canon heavyweights and lesser-known but equally gifted songwriters and discuss their importance, context, and history. Both beautiful and emotionally arresting, the new album is a collection of stories as much as songs—stories of the women and men who (sometimes literally) gave their lives to strike, revolt, and emancipate the working class. Heroes featured in this session might include Sarah Ogan Gunning, Ralph Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, Ella May Wiggins, Joe Hill, Paul Robeson, John Handcox, Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, and more anonymous proletarian songwriters, whose names have been forgotten but their words immortalized. Come be moved by the music and stories of the working-class!
Mat Callahan is a musician and author originally from San Francisco. Recent projects include the republication of Songs of Freedom by Irish revolutionary James Connolly, the recording and publication of Working-Class Heroes, and the launch of the multimedia project Songs of Slavery and Emancipation. He is the author of five books including, in 2017, The Explosion of Deferred Dreams (PM Press) and A Critical Guide to Intellectual Property (Zed Books). Callahan can be reached at www.matcallahan.com.
Yvonne Moore is a singer and bandleader originally from Schaffhausen. In addition to recording numerous albums of her own music, Moore is co-founder and treasurer of the Art in History and Politics Association, whose purpose is to discover, publish, and popularize music, graphic art, and texts created by participants in conflicts such as the struggle to abolish slavery. Her exploration of the songs of Sarah Ogan Gunning led to the making of Working-Class Heroes. Moore can be reached at www.matandyvonne.com
Pick up a copy of Working-Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song: A Songbook
For the full Howard Zinn Book Fair schedule.
I hope to see you at the Howard Zinn Book Fair! If you see me running around with a camera and a microphone, stop me and say hello.
