Tag Archives: Book Launch

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.

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.

Word Up Recirculation: Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s BURN ME BACK with Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Caridad De La Luz (La Bruja), and Massiel Alfonso

Friday, October 24, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

REGISTER

Word Up welcomes author Peggy Robles-Alvarado for a celebration of her latest book, Burn Me Back, published by Four Way Books, with guest readers Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Caridad De La Luz (La Bruja), and Massiel Alfonso as they explore and interrogate Latina narrative and family lore that reimagines the future from the ashes of loss.

“Let us begin by declaring that Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a magic maker. Her poetry plows under your skin until you feel your soul brimming with epiphanies. In Burn Me Back, Robles-Alvarado invites us to party with the machinations of truth-telling, and no matter how much you try to avert its gaze, there is enough lyric, enough innovative turn of phrase, enough history, enough fire, enough celestial invocation, enough family lore to make you a believer in rebirth, in salvaging what is left in the aftermath of a lineage fractured by secrets. If you ever doubted poetry’s ability to make you whole, welcome to this sublime reckoning.”—Willie Perdomo, The Crazy Bunch

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

“My Spanglish,” Peggy Robles-Alvarado declares, “drops the -s and makes it ma’ o meno’,” replaces accent marks with side-eye, “has a Tía sin papeles,” and recognizes that “there is no other way to say— / Cónchole papi, you look good!” Igniting across tongues, cultures, and countries, the incendiary poems in Burn Me Back harness the incantatory power of language through hybrid forms, preserving a beloved father’s memory, enshrining the legacy of the Latino immigrant community in Washington Heights and the Bronx, reimagining the world we share, and speaking toward a hopeful multiplicity of possible futures. At the cross section of Puerto Rican and Dominican diasporas, rooted in ancestral narratives and infused with generational dislocation, this speaker refuses to abandon what resists translation, makes the space she needs, and transforms objects as she names them: “My Spanglish knows a fire escape is also a terrace.” Yes, the language here is a feat of engineering — a design shaped by the conditions of emergency, an architecture of survival, deliverance to open air. Like isolating the notes in a thunderous chord, Robles-Alvarado dexterously teases out each word’s many meanings, listening for the individual strains that created her as she archives family lore and fleshes out her personal history, writing against patriarchy while codifying working-class wisdom. She reconstructs a whole genealogy in “What They Mean by Papers,” reciting a negative litany of “papeles.” “Not the Daily News or El Diario La Prensa, / or the kind my mother read to me on Sunday / mornings,” her “throat full of / pelitos de mango,” “Not the kind Tía Weltina used to roll her tobacco with,” “conjuring / Taíno spirits she exhaled … as she tried to memorize the national anthem,” but the kind “Uncle Rito forged” while he “learned to curl the R in his name / as if writing sacred geometry,” “the kind that convinced four of my aunts to marry older / naturalized men in exchange for an acre of my grandfather’s campo” — the kind that required the rest of their lives as payment, “their bodies, / all their milk and honey, all their amber and caña dulce / sacrificed to the lust of viejos verdes, old bastards / who soured early on too much tabaco y ron and wanted to plant / their moldy seeds in supple girls who had never seen snow.” Robles-Alvarado orchestrates the fullness of her song by refusing to leave anyone out, by making room for a term’s contradictory definitions and playing through discordant combinations until the dissonance resolves. What began as an elegy composed by a daughter lost in mourning becomes an expansive arrangement sounding rupture and repair. This music travels between loss and recovery, addiction and sobriety, the cooling embers of lost childhood and the heat of the present, this very moment in which you could reach out to the people around you and ask them to be here with you for every scalding second, the warmth of your skin against theirs posing a burning question — an invitation to burn you back.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a three-time International Latino Book Award winner, and a BRIO award recipient. She has earned writing fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights, The Frost Place, The Ashbery Home School, VONA, Candela Playwrights, Dramatic Question Theater, and NALAC. With two master’s degrees in education and an MFA in performance studies, Peggy’s work appears in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, ¡Manteca!, great weather for MEDIA, and What Saves Us, as well as online in Poets.org, The Quarry at Split This Rock, The Common, Tribes.org, and NACLA.org. She has been featured at Solfest Latine Theater Festival, The Dodge Poetry Festival, Lincoln Center, HBO Habla Women, The Smithsonian Institute, PEN America, Harvard University, and AWP. Through her 501(c)(3), Robleswrites Productions Inc.,she created Lalibreta.online and The Abuela Stories Project. Learn more at robleswrites.com.

Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow is an Associate Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, NY and the CUNY Graduate Center PhD program in English specializing in Latinx Literature and Culture. She is the author/ editor of seven volumes including the poetry collection Coatlicue Eats the Apple; the anthology, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets; the edited volume, La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades; and the edited volume Scholars in COVID Times. Her most recent scholarly book project, A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture (2020), examines the creative worlds and cultural productions of Mexican migrants in New York City. Her second book of poetry, Chingona Rules (2021), was a Gold Medal Winner of the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, International Latino Book Awards (2022). She is a poetry editor for Women Studies Quarterly, and Arts & Literature editor for Latinx Pop Magazine. To learn more visit www.drmelissacastillogarsow.com

Caridad De La Luz (La Bruja) won an Emmy in 2022 and in the same year became the Executive Director of the NUYORICAN POETS CAFE where she began her career in 1996. Caridad has balanced her career of activism, education, spirituality and entertainment. She received the Puerto Rican Women Legacy Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award from The Bronx Historical Society and was honored as A Bronx Living Legend. She was named “Top 20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know”.

Massiel Alfonso is a Dominican author, award-winning poet, and multidisciplinary artist who believes stories are medicine. Her debut, Handful of Poems, dives deep into human emotions with honesty and simplicity, earning First Place at the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards and Honorable Mention at the International Latino Book Awards. Through poetry, performance, and community workshops, Massiel creates art that challenges societal norms and makes space for conversations about beauty, identity, and change. Massiel focuses on documenting her existence through storytelling, as a reminder that we exist and our art deserves to exist too.

Word Up Recirculation – YUPANQUI EN EL CAMINO: Belén Ramet & Pablo Maldonado

Sunday, August 3, 2025 – 4:00pm to 5:00pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

register

“Yupanqui on the Road” celebrates the work of one of the greatest exponents of Argentine music by Atahualpa Yupanqui and Astor Piazzolla, among other Argentine authors. This unique concert combines the emotive voice of Belén Ramet with the excellent arrangements and guitar of Pablo Maldonado, accompanied by images and scents of the Argentine landscape that Yupanqui loved and sang about.

Includes Argentine music classics such as: “Guitarra Dímelo Tú,” “Tú que Puedes Vuelve,” “El Árbol que Tú Olvidaste,” “Criollita Santiagueña,” “Luna Tucumana,” among many other well-known titles by Yupanqui.

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.

Word Up Recirculation: Book Launch: Ellen Hagan & David Flores’s TELL ME EVERY LIE with Renée Watson

Tuesday, June 24, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

register

Word Up celebrates the launch of local authors Ellen Hagan and David Flores’s Tell Me Every Lie, a moving, layered young adult novel in two voices about finding truth in the lies we tell ourselves. There will be a reading, Q&A, and special guests to celebrate the launch. In conversation with Hagan & Flores will be Renée Watson, author of All the Blues in the Sky.

“A simmering romance in which two recent high school graduates at an elite resort endeavor to reinvent themselves by telling lies-and maybe fall in love. The protagonists remain sympathetic even amid their mutual deceit, while the cozy plot builds to a compassionate, mature, and surprising resolution.” —Publishers Weekly

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

John Paul Reyes wants to escape the worst truths in his life-other people’s pity since his dad died, and everyone else’s expectations about what he should do with his life now that he’s graduated high school. When he arrives at the Majestic Mountain resort with his Tita Abrigo’s wealthy family, he sees a way to escape-he can be JP Abrigo, rich and set, and he can lie his way to feeling fine.

Mia Malik is trapped in this town, working hard at the resort, trying to escape her broken family and to make her way to the prestigious art program she was accepted into. She’s desperate to afford her way there, and she’s sick of the privileged guests who have the whole world open to them, who don’t really even see her.

But then another staffer dares Mia to make one of the guests fall for her. If she can, she’ll collect enough money to get out. Mia knows this is dangerously against the rules, and doesn’t even want to pretend to like an entitled rich kid, but then she meets JP. Lying to him starts off easy, but then there’s more to him than she expected. And the way JP feels about Mia? So real. As their week together runs out, Mia and JP will have to dig themselves out from the lies they tell to see if there’s any truth in the feelings they have for each other.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her books include: Crowned, Hemisphere, Watch Us Rise (YA collaboration with Renée Watson), Blooming Fiascoes, Reckless, Glorious, Girl, Don’t Call Me a Hurricane, All That Shines and Tell Me Every Lie (YA collaboration with David Flores forthcoming from Bloomsbury, Spring 2025). Ellen’s poems and essays can be found in: So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, Creative Nonfiction, Underwired Magazine, She Walks in Beauty, Small Batch, Southern Sin, ESPNW and Oprah Daily. She is the recipient of a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the 2013 NoMAA Creative Arts Grant and received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. National arts residencies include The Hopscotch House and Louisiana Arts Works. Ellen is Head of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program (founded in partnership with Ambassador Caroline Kennedy) with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines. www.ellenhagan.com @ellenhagan

David Flores is a photographer, filmmaker, and educator. His images can be found on the covers of Poets & Writers, Scalawag, and PLUCK. His work has been showcased at The Kentucky Center, The Verbal Arts Centre of Northern Ireland, and film festivals across the country. In 2018, David began work on “Nueva Bronx: 21st Century Families” — bringing free family portraiture to Railroad Park in the Bronx. This project is his response to recent nationalist movements that have attempted to remove and erase familial representations of immigrants and people of color. David believes that family, in all of its beautiful forms, stands as a cornerstone of the human experience, creating intersections between past, present and future and simultaneously weaving larger connections in the community. David is a regular guest artist of the Digital Age Learning Institute, the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, and the Alice Hoffman Young Writer’s Retreat at Adelphi University. Recent arts residencies include ArtBuilt, Global Writes, Louisiana Arts Works, and the DreamYard Project. David lives in Manhattan with his partner and children.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Her novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award. Her books include the Ryan Hart series, Some Places More Than Others, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, cowritten with Ilyasah Shabazz, Watch Us Rise, cowritten with Ellen Hagan, and Love Is a Revolution, as well as acclaimed picture books: Summer Is Here, Maya’s Song, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, written with Nikole Hannah-Jones, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, and Harlem’s Little Blackbird, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Renée splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City.