Word Is Change

5/28 Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon with Jules Wernersbach (Work to Do), Radhika Singh (Earthly Playing Field), Anton Solomonik (Realistic Fiction), , Garron Charles, Juan Camillo Garza, and Francesca/Forza

Sun 5/17 We welcome two fact checkers, Austin Kelley and Dan Kaufman, to celebrate the PB release of The Fact Checker. Austin will be in conversation with labor journalist Dan, The Fall of Wisconsin, about the novel, journalism, and political story-telling in 21st c. America.

Excited for the upcoming conversation about *How To Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza* by Adam Johnson with Adam and Nima Shirazi of @CitationsPod tomorrow (Thursday) at 7pm in Brooklyn

Excited for the upcoming conversation about *How To Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza* by Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI with Adam and Nima Shirazi @WideAsleepNima of @CitationsPod tomorrow (Thursday) at 7pm in Brooklyn

There is no internet. No signal. No sound. No world beyond this cage. I walked thirty minutes through ruins and dust. Not in search of escape, but for a fragment of signal, just enough to whisper, “We are still alive.” Not because anyone is listening, but because to die unheard is the final death. Gaza is silent now. Not with peace, but with obliteration. Not a silence of stillness, but of smothering. They severed the last cable. No messages leave. No images enter. Even grief has been forbidden. I passed the corpses of buildings, of homes, of men, some breathing, some not. All of them erased by the same hand that erased our voices. This is not a siege of bombs alone. It is a siege of memory: a war against our ability to say, “We were here.” The bombing never stopped, especially in Jabalia. They shell the streets where children beg for food. They shell the lines where mothers wait for flour. They shell hunger itself. No food. No water. No exit. And those who try, those who reach for aid, are struck down. People die here, and no one knows. Not because the killing paused, but because the killing of connection succeeded. The internet was our final breath. It was not a luxury; it was the last evidence of our humanity. Now it is gone. And in the dark, they massacre without consequence. I found this faint eSIM signal as a dying man finds a flicker of flame. I stood beneath a broken sky, risking death, not for rescue, but to send this. A single message. A last resistance. If you are reading this, remember: we walked through fire to say it. We were not silent. We were silenced. And when the cables are restored, the truth will bleed through the wires, and the world will know what it chose not to see.

Sarah Aziza 
in conversation with Andrew Riad with poetry from Lara Atallah and Chase Berggrun! a part of the New York Arab Festival Tue May 27th at 7PM The Word Is Change 368 Tompkins Ave, Bed-Stuy

The spaces revealed through the practice of time manipulation in Black cultures lend themselves to storytelling, a time-hopping process that integrates memory and community

You’re invited to the Brooklyn Launch of The Afrofuturist Evolution: Creative Paths to Self-Discovery by Ytasha Womack Sun 4/6 @ 7 @ytashawomack

Holiday Hours Tuesday Dec 17th thru Monday Dec 23rd 11am -- 8pm Tuesday Dec 24th 11am -- 5pm Wednesday Dec 25th closed We’ve got lots of books in the store for you to give, for special orders we suggest using our bookshop.org store and we also have gift cards

9/25 at 7pm Jessica Pishko @JessPish launches The Highest Law in the Land investigating the impunity with which sheriffs police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics. (with John Ganz)

Once again, the police version of events turns out to have been an utter self-serving fabrication.

“Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series”, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future, presents for the 2024-2025 season “Gathering Utopias.”

9/27 we will meet to discuss Ursula Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Evidence” from *Octavia’s Brood*. Subsequent meetings are on Fridays, October 4 and October 11 with readings TBA. Feel free to attend one or all!

Gathering Utopias Friday, September 27th at 7pm In conjunction with “Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series,” which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future, we invite you to a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary.

Tonight! Join us 8/7 @7pm to welcome renowned Palestine activist @stevesalaita to launch his first novel, Daughter, Son, Assassin, a story of family bonds amid political betrayal that explores the drastic steps that a young girl will take in order to find a sense of belonging.