Tag Archives: Author Reading

Word Up Recirculation – Barnard Center for Research on Women: The Elsewhere is Black

Join BCRW for an exciting book salon honoring Marisa Solomon’s 

The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life!

Join us for an exciting book salon in celebration of Barnard Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies Marisa Solomon’s The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life with J.T. Roane (Geography, Rutgers) and Mon M., moderated by C. Riley Snorton (English & Comparative Literature and ISSG, Columbia).

In The Elsewhere Is Black, Solomon examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns of Virginia’s Tidewater, Solomon contends that waste infrastructures concentrate environmental risk in an elsewhere that is routinely Black.

She theorizes the relationship between the devaluation of land and Black and more-than-human life to reveal how the risks of poisoning, police violence, dispossession, and poverty hold Black life captive. Highlighting the creativity and resilience that emerge amid these conditions, Solomon, Roane and Monhapatra will invite us to consider collaborative conversations across new eco-political possibilities that center the book’s fundamental ask: What forms of environmentalism arise when Black un/freedom has always been entangled with waste?

Additional information is available on the BCRW event page.
Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, abolitionist ecologies, Black geographies, feminist theory and queer of color critique. Her new book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Duke University Press 2025), which received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award, considers ecological politics from the position of criminalized Black dispossession. In so doing, The Elsewhere Is Black examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism in the U.S. Locating Black survival as a site from which alternative eco-political imaginations spring, she foregrounds how people live and dream amidst waste’s daily accumulation. Solomon opens new ecological horizons to ask: What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?

She has written a number of articles on the relationship between waste and Black life including “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” for the Journal of Labor and Working-Class History and “Ecologies Elsewhere” for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and “Living with Harm” forthcoming in Scholar and Feminist Online. Her work also appears in a number of edited volumes, including Waste as Critique (Oxford University Press), Black Environmentalisms (forthcoming with Duke University Press), The Politics of Disposability: Discard Studies in an Era of Devaluation (also forthcoming with Duke) as well as in a compilation of essays for the 2023 Venice Biennial on Everlasting Plastics. She is currently the director of Barnard’s interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor (ICORE/MORE), an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Scholar and Feminist Online and the former co-director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies Working Group at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, where she was affiliated with the Earth Institute.

Mon M. (they/she) is a spadeworker and propagandist from India, based in New York City. Mon’s work focuses on challenging and interrupting carceral expansion in the US, and beyond, through community and cultural organizing across experiences of gender, migration, and disability. Their writing explores internationalist anti-caste and feminist solidarities, as well as techniques of organizing within and against the scourge of authoritarian violence while resisting reformist and liberal capture.

C. Riley Snorton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and jointly appointed with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. As a cultural theorist, his work focuses on racial, sexual, and transgender histories and cultural productions in Africa and the Diaspora. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee. Snorton is a co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020) with Hentyle Yapp and The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024) with Margo Natalie Crawford. He also co-authored the book, A Black Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2026) with Darius Bost. Snorton is currently working on his third single-author monograph, Black Trans Matters, which extends and proffers theories, practices, and material reflections on global black trans life. Working at the conjuncture of Black ecocriticism and trans studies, Black Trans Matters engages with questions of historicity, extraction, representability, and transformation.

J.T. Roane is author of the award winning book Dark Agoras Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU 2023). He is assistant professor of Africana Studies and Geography and co-directs the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers. Roane serves on the board for an Indigenous and Black led food and environmental justice organization in Virginia’s Tidewater, Just Harvest.

Co-sponsored by Barnard’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department.

Word Up Recirculation: Ashley D. Farmer’s QUEEN MOTHER: BLACK NATIONALISM, REPARATIONS, AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF AUDLEY MOORE with Tamara Payne

Tuesday, November 11, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

REGISTER | $5 suggested donation

Word Up welcomes the award-winning historian of Black radical politics, Ashley D. Farmer, to celebrate Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore, the definitive biography of Audley Moore—mother of modern Black Nationalism and trailblazer in the fight for reparations. In conversation with Farmer will be Tamara Payne, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X.

“Queen Mother is a sensitively written take on a century of Black history, and an absorbing account of a Black woman who survived the ravages of white supremacy and responded to the challenges of her life with intellectual curiosity, moral courage, and clarity. Ashley Farmer’s book pays homage not just to Queen Mother Moore, but also to the scores of Black women who have built movements and dreamt of transforming their worlds.” —Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In the world of Black radical politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore distinguished herself as a leading progenitor of Black Nationalism, the founder of the modern reparations movement, and, from her Philadelphia and Harlem homes, a mentor to some of America’s most influential Black activists.

And yet, she is far less remembered than many of her peers and protégés—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ahmad, to name just a few—and the ephemera of her life are either lost or plundered. In Queen Mother, celebrated writer and historian Ashley D. Farmer restores Moore’s faded portrait, delivering the first ever definitive account of her life and enduring legacy.

Deeply researched and richly detailed, Queen Mother is more than just the biography of an American icon. It’s a narrative history of 20th-century Black radicalism, told through the lens of the woman whose grit and determination sustained the movement.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashley D. Farmer is an award-winning writer, researcher, and cultural analyst who explores Black history and its implications today. Her first book, Remaking Black Power, was shortlisted for numerous prizes, and she has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Whiting Foundation.  Farmer’s ideas and insights have appeared in multiple venues including Harper’s Bazaar, NPR, The Washington Post, and Teen Vogue. Farmer lives, reads, and writes in Austin, Texas, and is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Tamara Payne served as the principal researcher and co-author on The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Award for Nonfiction, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Les Payne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who served as an editor and columnist at Newsday, worked on The Dead Are Arising for nearly thirty years.

Recirculation: Book Launch Sharina Maíllo-Pozo’s BRIDGING SONIC BORDERS

Join us for the book launch of Bridging Sonic Borders: Popular Music in Contemporary Dominican/Dominicanyork Literature by Sharina Maíllo-Pozo. Bridging Sonic Borders explores how Dominican and Dominicanyork literary voices across generations, languages, and geographies intertwine with popular music to reimagine cultural identity, history, and belonging.

For this celebration, Maíllo-Pozo will be in conversation with Lorgia García-Peña, offering an engaging dialogue on diaspora, literature, music, and the multiple ways dominicanidad is expressed and transformed across borders. The presentation and dialogue will highlight the significance of this work within the broader Dominican cultural landscape.

Expect a vibrant exchange of ideas, readings, and reflections that honor the sonic and literary archives connecting the Dominican Republic and its diaspora in New York City!

Word Up: Robert Snyder’s WHEN THE CITY STOPPED with Led Black and Dave Crenshaw

Saturday, December 6, 2025 – 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Word Up Community Bookshop / Librería Comunitaria
2113 Amsterdam Ave. & 165th St.
New York, NY 10032

REGISTER | $5 suggested donation

Word Up welcomes Manhattan Borough Historian Robert W. Snyder to discuss When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers with Uptown civic leaders Led Black and Dave Crenshaw.

“The real-life experiences of New Yorkers during the COVID-19 outbreak are at the heart of this collection of as-told-to stories. Snyder highlights the actions, big and small, that people took to help the city survive, including medical personnel who collaborated across hospitals to find health-care solutions, and bus drivers who stayed on their routes.” —The New Yorker

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 30 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees for this event must wear a mask inside.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (& 165th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 168th St and the A/C train to 163rd or 168th  St.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In When the City Stopped, Robert Snyder tells the story of COVID-19 in the words of ordinary New Yorkers, illuminating the fear and uncertainty of life in the early weeks and months, as well as the solidarity that sustained the city. New Yorkers were “alone together,” separated by the protective measures of social distancing and the fundamental inequalities of life and work in New York City. Through their personal accounts, we see that while many worked from home, others knowingly exposed themselves to the dangers of the pandemic as they drove buses, ran subways, answered 911 calls, tended to the sick, and made and delivered meals.

Snyder builds bridges of knowledge and empathy between those who bore dangerous burdens and those who lived in relative safety. The story is told through the words of health care workers, grocery clerks, transit workers, and community activists who recount their experiences in poems, first-person narratives, and interviews. When the City Stopped preserves for future generations what it was like to be in New York when it was at the center of the pandemic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. His books include Crossing Broadway and Transit Talk.

Bruce’s Garden Summer Readings

Geoff Wisner on George Tempelton Strong’s Civil War Diaries

George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries (Library of America, 2026) Geoff Wisner, editor.

Geoff Wisner is an author and editor whose work is published widely. In his latest book, the noted Thoreau scholar turned his keen editorial insights to the prolific diarist George Templeton Strong’s writings on the Civil War. These writings are remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail. Strong wrote eyewitness accounts of the 1863 Draft Riots, field hospitals teeming with wounded men, and his meetings with both Grant and Lincoln. This book is greatly anticipated by scholars, and should also be a great read for all interested in New York history.