bell hooks left us in this world with a literal STACK of wisdom and analysis about love, life, and feminism. Her work has transformed the thinking of many people we know in our organizing community. We couldn’t think of a better way to honor bell hooks’ legacy than starting off a new season with this virtual interview with Stacy Davis Gates, Vice President of the Chicago Teachers Union. 

Stacy shares the stories of her personal transformation and political awakening after reading bell hooks' Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Monica and Page chat with Stacy about her struggles and lessons learned from finding affirmation through bell hooks' words to applying this information to her lifelong journey as a Black woman in building community power in coalition with Black men and non-Black people. 

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did. 
bell, we thank you for everything. Ashe.   

Transcript and key questions explored can be found at thelitreview.org!

Episode 58: Ain't I A Woman with Stacy Davis Gates

The healing justice movement is an intersectional and organized resistance to the state and state violence, but why is it so often misunderstood as simply an opposition to grind culture? In this episode, we discuss ableism, disability, healing justice, and the book Kindling by Aurora Levins Morales with one of our sheroes and teachers, Shira Hassan, co-founder of Just Practice and former Executive Director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project. This is a rich episode with so many gems of wisdom and raw vulnerability. It’s one to listen to again and again (and again)!

Listener's Note: This conversation includes mentions of sexual violence and abuse. Please listen with care. 

Transcript and key questions explored in this episode can be found at thelitreview.org.

Episode 59: Kindling with Shira Hassan

An epic book and an epic guest: Welcome to episode 60! Since the start of this podcast, the Lit Review has always wanted to feature Marx’s Capital with someone who could really help organizers dig into it. Published in 1867, this 1,000+ page text offers a thorough, interdisciplinary critique of capitalism. This book is rich with history, philosophy, and is a classic of political economy. It is also… extremely difficult to read. Notoriously long, full of jargon, and extremely dense, Capital is one of those books that you can read for years and still not understand. Don’t worry though, this episode has you covered, at least to start! 

Monica and Page invited radical activist, educator, author, and founder of Critical Resistance, Angela Davis—yes, THAT Angela Davis, to break down Marx’s (and Engels’!) key ideas with her professorial brilliance, and to explain the importance and ongoing relevance of what Marx had to say. 

Transcript and key questions explored can be found at thelitreview.org!

Episode 60: Capital with Angela Davis

Audre Lorde is revered for her poetry and writings, rightfully so! Her works are fundamental to the development of Black Feminism. But what did she have to say about her own life? What were the themes and lessons she learned from her experiences? How does Audre, the person, differ from Audre "the icon" that many of us know? As Audre insisted: “If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other peoples’ fantasies for me and eaten alive.” 

Our guest today to discuss Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is K Toyin Agbebiyi, a Black lesbian and disabled organizer, writer, and macro social worker from Georgia. K has created and participated in a number of campaigns and projects including 8 to Abolition, the No New Jails Campaign, Inside Outside collective, and Survived and Punished New York. This thoughtful conversation with K dives deep into questions around grief, love, and loss. And we get real about the challenges and teachings of relationships, and how it all relates to our organizing work.

Transcript and key questions explored can be found at thelitreview.org.

Episode 61: Zami with K Agbebiyi

There are no shortcuts to disability justice. Access is a process, not a list that can be checked off in organizing work. Part-manifesto, part guide, part-memoir, and so many more parts, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a necessary intervention in our largely ableist movements and world. In this episode, we chatted with Heena Sharma, a queer South Asian organizer with the New York chapter of Survived & Punished. Together, we discussed disability justice, survivorhood, sustainability, recognizing wholeness, and so much more. We invite you to join us with some tea and cookies (or whatever makes you cozy) and tune in to this necessary conversation.

Transcript, key questions, and references to resources mentioned in the episode can be found at thelitreview.org.

Episode 62: Care Work with Heena Sharma

The Question by Henri Alleg is a short book with a lifelong impact on today’s special guest. The legendary radical activist and movement lawyer, Bernardine Dohrn, first read this anti-war, anti-colonial, anti-racist pamphlet from 1958 as a student in high school. The Question recounts French journalist Henri Alleg’s experience of thirty days of torture in Algeria during the War for Independence. Though it would be years before Bernardine began organizing and taking revolutionary direct action, this class assignment marked a radicalizing moment in her life. We were honored to have a conversation with this fierce feminist powerhouse about the roles that witnessing and storytelling play in ending the practice of torture.

Listener’s note: This episode contains descriptions of torture and violence. Please listen with care. 

See our transcript and key questions at thelitreview.org.

Episode 63: The Question with Bernardine Dohrn

“We can’t have a conversation about affordable housing without having a conversation about landlord profit.” If you were mad about landlords before, just wait until you listen to this conversation. The mainstream narrative on affordable housing has revolved largely around public housing, but a glaring absence is a much larger demographic: low-income renters. To close out our season, we talked with Maya Dukmasova, former Chicago Reader reporter, current senior reporter at Injustice Watch, about Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Maya brilliantly breaks down Desmond’s objective that eviction is not just a symptom of poverty, but a cause of poverty, and her own reporting on the eviction crisis in Chicago. 

See our key questions from this episode and transcript at thelitreview.org.

Episode 64: Evicted with Maya Dukmasova

Assigned as essential reading to many local, Chicago organizers by prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois details the role that Black people played in reconstruction after the Civil War, when Black people were freed from slavery and began reconstructing American society. 

Page May chats with Nathan Ryan of Grassroots Collaborative, and Debbie Southorn of American Friends Service Committee to discuss the book.

Episode 2: Black Reconstruction with Nathan Ryan and Debbie Southorn

Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 by Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the Black protest movement in the United States during the time period of 1930 to 1970.

Jasson Perez is a Chicago-raised Black scholar and organizer with 16+ years of experience, from labor to the movement for Black Lives. On this episode, Page chats with Jasson in a two-part series discussing McAdam's book.

Episode 9: Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency - Part 2 with Jasson Perez

Written in 1978 by Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, Orientalism is a seminal text critiquing the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism - how the Western world perceives the Orient.

Monica and Page talked with Muslim-Iranian writer, community organizer, and creative educator Hoda Katebi to understand how this book is relevant in our current political moment, and to help us breakdown core concepts and key vocab that Said delves into throughout the book.

Episode 11: Orientalism with Hoda Katebi

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire traces the roots of the Civil Rights Movement directly back to campaigns waged in defense of Black womanhood against sexual violence.

​For this episode, Monica and Page sat with their friend, mentor, and inspiration, Mariame Kaba, to talk through the details and significance of this repressed narrative.  Mariame Kaba is an abolitionist organizer, educator, and curator. She is the co-founder of Project NIA, and her work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, transformative justice, and supporting youth leadership development.

Listeners Note: Our conversation includes description of rape and sexual violence, so please listen with care.

Episode 12: At the Dark End of the Street with Mariame Kaba

Monica and Page sit down with Joey Mogul to talk about Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, a book that she co-wrote with Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock in 2011. Joey is an attorney with the People's Law Office, initiated and co-founded Chicago Torture Justice Memorials and represented Jon Burge torture survivors demanding reparations from the city of Chicago, and won!

Drawing on years of research, on-the-ground activism, and legal advocacy, their book examines queer & trans historical experiences-as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime, and unpacks queer criminal archetypes-like “gleeful gay killers,” “lethal lesbians,” “disease spreaders,” and “deceptive gender benders“-to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed.

And because it's Pride season, we also got into some conversation around Joey's amazing direct action experiences with disrupting Chicago Pride in the 90's with Queer to the Left, so basically, you should tune in now!

Episode 16: Queer (In)Justice with Joey Mogul

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds is a radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help book designed to shape the futures we want to live. As brown argues, change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns.

Page and Monica sat down with Hannah Baptiste to chat about adrienne maree brown's newest book.

Episode 18: Emergent Strategy with Hannah Baptiste

​In this very special five-part episode, Page sat down with SNCC freedom fighter and Chicago-native, Fannie Rushing, for an extended conversation about her organizing experiences, and the seven books that have helped to define them. Not wanting to cut a single word, the interview is broken up into five parts. Take your time to listen, but take the time. It is a gift to all engaged in the struggle to build a better world.

Fannie's Seven Books: 
- Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby
- Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams
- Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire
- This Little Light of Mine by Kay Mills
- Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
- I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
- Earth Democracy by Vandana Shiva

Episode 20 - Part 1: Fannie discusses her friend and mentor, Ella Baker

Episode 20 - Part 2: Fannie talks Capitalism, Racism, Colonialism, and Haiti

Episode 20 - Part 3: Fannie Rushing on Fannie Lou Hamer

Episode 20 - Part 4: Fannie Answers: What is Organizing?

In his book, Black-On-Black Violence, Amos Wilson argues that "the criminalization of the Black American male is a psycho-politically engineered process designed to maintain the dependency and relative powerlessness" of Black people. Originally published in 1994, the book is still deeply relevant to reflect on today.

In this episode, Page sits down with teacher and organizer, Jasmine Adams, to discuss the lessons from this book.

Episode 22: Black-on-Black Violence with Jasmine Adams

When we think of Mexican communities, we think of Pilsen, Little Village, and in recent years, Albany Park. But who talks about the neighborhood of South Chicago? Monica and Page chat with powerful Mijente member, immigrants rights activist, baseball mom, and vital member of our Chicago organizing community, Corina Pedraza Palominos!

Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago from 1915-1940 by Michael Innis-Jiménez is a beautiful documentation Mexican migration, arguing that the Mexican immigrants who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment.

Episode 25: Steel Barrio with Corina Pedraza

​First published in 1999, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare is a groundbreaking book in the political realm of disability politics, and essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the intersections of queerness, disability, environmentalism, class, race, and more.

​Monica and Page sat down with Alison Kopit, a queer and disabled artist and doctoral candidate in Disability Studies at UIC, to talk about Exile and Pride. She is also the co-creator of The Not Sorry Project and on the editorial board of Monstering, a literary magazine for disabled women and non-binary folks.

Episode 26: Exile & Pride with Alison Kopit

From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America by Patrisia Macías-Rojas unpacks how the incarceration of over two million people in the United States gave impetus to a federal immigration initiative—The Criminal Alien Program (CAP)—designed to purge non-citizens from dangerously overcrowded jails and prisons.

In this episode, Monica and Page talk with their friend and organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), Arianna Salgado, about this history and its daily implications.

Episode 29: From Deportation to Prison with Arianna Salgado

Do you have your “go bag” ready? Are you ready to lose everything and everyone in order to get free? Aren’t these intense questions?? These are just some of the themes that are explored in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, a two-book series of dystopian, science fiction novels by the late Octavia E. Butler, where society has collapsed due to climate change, capitalism, and Christianity, and people, many strangers, have to create community in order to survive.

For this special live audience episode, Monica and Page are joined by writer, facilitator, Octavia Butler-scholar, pleasure activist and doula, adrienne maree brown. adrienne is the author of Emergent Strategy and co-editor of the anthology, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction for Social Justice Movements.

Episode 32: the Earthseed Series LIVE with adrienne maree brown

​There is a role for people who know things that others don’t, but how has our relationship with education and the teacher-student dynamic been shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy? In 1968, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, proposing a new relationship between the teacher, the student, and society. 
​
​In this episode, Monica and Page dive deeper into this influential book with Pilsen-based youth worker Hilda Franco!

Episode 34: Pedagogy of the Oppressed with Hilda Franco

When we are taught about the civil rights movement, the narratives of communities trained up in armed self-defense and grandmas with guns sitting on their porch are definitely left out. In Charles E. Cobbs Jr.’s book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, we are face-to-face with the vital role that armed self-defense played in the liberation and survival of Black communities.

Monica and Page sat down with educator and social justice activist, Mia Henry. Mia is one of the many founders of the Chicago Freedom School and also runs Freedom Lifted, a small social enterprise that hosts Civil Rights Movement tours in the deep South.

Episode 37: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed with Mia Henry

Monica and Page revisit Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois, this time with community organizer, Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, and former political prisoner, Frank Chapman. Tune in to hear Frank’s take on Du Bois and the social, economic and political changes that were taking place leading up to and through Reconstruction.

And in case you missed it, you can check out Page's conversation on Black Reconstruction in America with Chicago-based organizers Nathan Ryan and Debbie Southorn in Season 1, Episode 2.

Episode 42: Black Reconstruction In America with Frank Chapman

A hyper-local conversation: Who knew that the Chicago neighborhood 'Old Town' was actually part of Lincoln Park? Who knew it was a site of transformation, displacement, resistance, gentrification, AND urban renewal?

​Monica and Page sat down with author and policy analyst Daniel Kay Hertz to talk about his new book, The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago, published by Belt.

Episode 44: The Battle of Lincoln Park with Daniel Kay Hertz

Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 by Arnold Hirsch is considered a premier text on the subjects of housing and displacement. However, at about 382 dense & jargon-filled pages, it can be a bit intimidating. Here to offer a helpful summary is life-long Chicagoan, writer, co-founder of Transportation Equity Network, and neighborhood organizer Lynda Lopez.

Episode 45: Making the Second Ghetto with Lynda Lopez

What does fascism look like today in the U.S.? Where does the alt-right fit into this? How can it be fought?!

​Monica and Page sat down with Chicago-based Native abolitionist organizer, co-founder of Lifted Voice, podcast host of Movement Memos, and Truthout writer Kelly Hayes to discuss Shane Burley's Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It.

Episode 46: Fascism Today with Kelly Hayes

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence hands us a sharp critique of the toxic role that the non-profit industrial complex can play in managing our movements in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, published in 2007. 

​Monica and Page talk with Joy Messinger, a queer disabled femme organizer, former Program Officer at Third Wave Fund, and currently the Director of Training and Leadership at Funders for Justice.

Episode 48: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded with Joy Messinger

​This was a hard book to talk about, but we’re so glad that we did. The late Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is beloved to many and considered a fundamental text in Chicana and Latinx studies. With gorgeous prose, she richly captures the unique experiences of those who inhabit the borderlands; of place, gender, class, and identity. Anzaldúa's book offers a poetic description of what it’s like to be caught between worlds. At the same time, this work is rightly called-out for those that it erases: Black, Indigenous, and trans people —all also existing and resisting in the borderlands.
 
Monica and Page talk with Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute about the ongoing influence this book has had on her as a Black woman living on the borderlands of Chicago’s south side.

Episode 53: Borderlands with Trina Reynolds-Tyler

​Despite some truly 2020-style audio recording issues, our second to last episode of the season is here! Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, and Charles Payne, unearths the buried stories of the people, places, and struggles that laid the foundation for the Civil Rights movement. 

Monica and Page talk with Christian Snow of Assata’s Daughters and the People’s Law Office, who shares her love and key takeaways from the book.

Episode 55: Groundwork with Christian Snow

To close out the season, Monica and Page talk with Juliana Pino Alcaraz, Policy Director at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, about From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement by Luke Cole & Sheila Foster. 

This short but dense book focuses on the history of the Environmental Justice movement leading up to the signing of the 1994 Executive Order on Environmental Justice by President Clinton, and then outlines several examples of community efforts to resist environmental racism in the 1990s. Juliana breaks down  frameworks, structures, tactics, and campaign strategies, in addition to addressing what's missing. This is a longer episode because we just couldn’t cut any of this brilliance. Grab a notebook and get settled in!

Episode 56: From the Ground Up with Juliana Pino

It’s a wrap for Season 3!  In 8 episodes, we went deep on topics including colonization and land justice, civil rights history, and movement and organizing fundamentals. And in the midst of the pandemic, uprising, and elections, we did our best to highlight the amazing resistance work happening in Chicago. 
 
There’s no special guest on this season finale- just your favorite co-hosts chopping it up to share their highlights and lingering questions. We also have updates about what to expect for Season 4 and how you can help us make it the best season of The Lit Review yet! We’ll be back with new episodes this Summer. Until then, check out any of our past episodes, recommend us to a friend, and KEEP READING!

See links to action items, book shoutouts, and transcription at thelitreview.org

Episode 57: The In-between Episode!

Conversations with community organizers, activists, and cultural workers on the books that have shaped their theories of change. Think Spark notes in podcast form! thelitreview.org

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