We’re bringing the noise to these upcoming book festivals, conferences, radical gatherings, punk fests, and more. Come find our tables and say hello! Follow us on Twitter & Instagram to learn more.

• National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in New Orleans, LA from May 30 to June 3

• Ithaca Fest in Ithaca, NY from June 1 to 3

• Hot Bits queer porn film festival in Philadelphia, PA on June 9 and 10

• Midwest Renewable Energy Fair in Custer, WI from June 23 to 25

• Mosswood Meltdown in Oakland, CA from July 1 to 3

• Bellingham Pride in Bellingham, WA on July 8 and 9

• Readercon in Quincy, MA from July 14 to 16

• Reno Punk Rock Flea Market in Reno, NV on July 15 and 16

• Philly Punk Rock Flea Market in Philadelphia, PA on July 15 and 16

• Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival in Ithaca, NY on July 20 to 23

• NOFX Punk in Drublic Fest in Tacoma, WA on July 22 and 23

• Rebellion Punk Festival in Blackpool, UK from August 3 to 6

• DSA Convention in Chicago, IL from August 4 to 6

• Another Carolina Anarchist Book Fair in Asheville, NC from August 11 to 13

• Los Angeles Anarchist Book Fair in Los Angeles, CA on August 12

• Four Chord Punk Fest in Pittsburgh, PA on August 12 and 13

• The Society for the Study of Social Problems in Philadelphia, PA from August 18 to 20

• Seattle Anarchist Book Fair in Seattle, WA on August 26 and 27

• Bash Back in Chicago, IL from September 8 to 11

• and many more…

Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions Pop Up Events in Houston, TX with freedom fighters and coauthros dequi kioni-sadiki and Sekou Odinga.

Radio Interview @ All Real Radio on Thursday, June 1st: https://www.allrealradio.com

Pop Up Meet & Greet on Friday, June 2nd @ Kindred Stories: https://kindredstorieshtx.com

Backyard Bonfire @ private residence on Friday, June 2nd

Rest & Renewal @ Private Venue Sunday, June 4th

Book panel for It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History at Powell’s in Portland on Tuesday, June 6 featuring China, Jonathan Mozzochi, Mic Crenshaw, Erin Yanke, facilitated by Moe Bowstern

More information at Powells.

Rainbow Corpsepaint Workshop at International Society of Metal Studies, Concordia in Montreal on June 7, 2023. Join us for a “Rainbow Corpsepaint” Art Competition, hosted by the Black Metal Rainbows editors and contributors.

A Room of One’s Own of Madison, WI is thrilled to welcome Jon Melrod and Kim Kelly for a virtual conversation on their books Fighting Times and Fight Like Hell on Wednesday, June 7th at 6:00pm CDT. This is a virtual event on Crowdcast. Learn more here.

Click here to register on Crowdcast

About Fighting Times

Deeply personal, astutely political, Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War recounts the thirteen-year journey of Jonathan Melrod to harness working class militancy and jump start a revolution on the shop floor of the American Motors auto company in Wisconsin. Melrod faces termination, dodges the FBI, outwits collaborators in the UAW, and becomes the central figure in a multi-year, surreptitiously funded and orchestrated defamation lawsuit by American Motors against the rank- and-file shop newsletter Fighting Times, as he strives to build a class- conscious workers’ movement from the bottom up.

A radical to the core, Melrod was a key part of the campus insurrection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He left campus for the factory in 1972, hired along with hundreds of other youthful job seekers onto the mind-numbing auto assembly line. Fighting Times paints a portrait of these rebellious and alienated young hires, many of whom were returning Black Vietnam vets returning from the war-torn jungles with little faith in the system and with little tolerance for authority. Containing dozens of archival photographs, Fighting Times captures the journey of a militant anti-racist revolutionary who rose through the ranks of his UAW local without compromising his politics or his dedication to building a class-conscious workers’ movement.

The book will inspire and arm a new generations of labor militants and organizers with the skills and attitude to challenge the odds and fight the egregious abuses of the exploitative capitalist system.

About Fight Like Hell

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.

The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this assiduously researched work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that history and shows how the rights the American worker has today—the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job—were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears.

Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon’s warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland’s Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s.

Black Metal Rainbows book launch in Montreal, QC on June 9th from 6-8pm at Librairie Résonance Bookstore. Learn more here.

Join Selma James, author of Our Time Is Now and Sex, Race, and Class in Philadelphia, PA with The Global Women’s Strike at the new Crossroads Women’s Center in Philadelphia for an international and community gathering, online and in person, from June 9th to 11th, 2023 at 5011 Wayne Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19144, US. Learn more below and here. Join us!

The Graphic History Collective celebrates Mr. Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe.

Monday June 19th at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago, IL from 7:00pm – 8:00pm.

Julia Smith and Sean Carleton of The Graphic History Collective with historian Peter Cole. Learn more here.

Before the Golden Age of comic books, there was Mr. Block: a bumbling, boss-loving, anti-union blockhead, brought to life over a hundred years ago by subversive cartoonist Ernest Riebe. A dedicated labour activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, Riebe dreamed up his iconic, union-hating anti-hero to satirize conservative workers’ faith in the capitalist system that exploits them. This wickedly funny anthology of Riebe’s writings and comics is a treasure trove of radical 20th-century art and an essential addition to the bookshelves of comics lovers, historians, and labour activists alike. As income inequality skyrockets and the collective power of the working class is undermined, the lessons from Mr. Block’s misadventures and misbeliefs are as relevant today as ever. Building the new world from the ashes of the old demands many tools—and laughter will always be one of them.

The Graphic History Collective is a group of activists, artists, and researchers who combine art and history to promote education and social justice. They have produced a number of projects, including billboards, posters, colouring books, and several graphic books. Their projects show that you don’t need a cape and a pair of tights to change the world!

Sean Carleton is a founding member of the Graphic History Collective and an Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He studies colonial violence, Indigenous resistance, and the history of Canada’s Indian Residential School system. Sean is the author of Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling (UBC Press, 2022).

Julia Smith is a member of the Graphic History Collective and an assistant professor in the Labour Studies Program at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. She studies union organizing and the history and politics of women’s labour activism. Julia has published articles on feminist union organizing and labour relations in the airline and banking industries.

Building Community Defense, a discussion with the coeditors of It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History

Tuesday, June 20th, 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET, a virtual event hosted by Firestorm Books, with Moe Bowstern – co-author (Portland), Coyote Amrich – contributing photographer (Pittsburgh), Jonathan Mozzochi – CHD (Portland), Jon Bair – SHARP (LA). Learn more and register here.

What does it take to keep fascists and white nationalist organizations out of our communities? Contributors to It Did Happen Here, a new oral history of successful anti-racist organizing in Portland, reflect on the hard-won lessons from the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and 90s.

It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History compiles interviews with dozens of people who worked together during the waning decades of the twentieth century to reveal an inspiring collaboration between groups of immigrants, civil rights activists, militant youth, and queer organizers. This oral history focuses on participants in three core groups: the Portland chapters of Anti-Racist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and the Coalition for Human Dignity.

Editor Scott Branson is joined by contributors to Surviving the Future, a new collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Panelists include E Ornelas, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Yasmin Nair.

Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition—of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society—this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability.

E Ornelas is a PhD candidate, instructor at the University of Minnesota, and descendant of a survivor of the Sherman Institute, a Native boarding school in Riverside, California. E studies community-based, abolitionist-informed responses to gendered, racialized, and colonial violence in Black and Indigenous speculative fiction. This research has been published in the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies and Science Fiction Research Association Review. E co-founded Black & Pink Minneapolis and the Mutual Aid Twin Cities Housing Cooperative.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for “a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.” Her upcoming book Touching the Art will be published in November by Soft Skull Press.

Scott Branson is a queer/trans anarchist writer, translator, community organizer, and teacher. They were an organizer for the UNC Asheville/Davidson College queer conferences that inspired this book. They translated Jacques Lesage de la Haye’s The Abolition of Prison and Guy Hocquenghem’s second book of essays, Gay Liberation after May ’68, for which they also wrote a critical introduction. Scott is the author of Practical Anarchism: A Daily Guide and is currently working on a book on trans-anarcha-feminism. They often contribute to The Final Straw Radio, a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast.

Yasmin Nair is a writer, academic, and activist. She’s an editor at large at Current Affairs, on the editorial board of the Anarchist Review of Books, co-founder of the radical queer editorial collective Against Equality and the (Volunteer) Policy Director of Gender JUST. She’s currently working on her book Strange Love: A History of Social Justice And Why It Needs To Die. Her writing can be found at www​.yas​min​nair​.com.

Kyle Decker and Kenneth Wishnia celebrate THIS RANCID MILL on Thursday, June 29th at 7pm at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago, IL.