Every aspect of life in our society is lived on the hard-edge of racial hierarchy and class division—and the American way of birth is no exception. Black maternal mortality is 69.9 per 100,000 live births, nearly 3 times the rate of white women—and that’s only part of the story. We’re delighted to be meeting up at Pilsen Community Books with my magnificent sister-in-law, Jennifer Dohrn—a legendary midwife in New York, and a professor and Assistant Dean of the Office of Global Initiatives at Columbia University School of Nursing—for a discussion focused on her new book Mothers, Midwives and Reimagining Birthing in the Bronx. Jennifer initiated the first freestanding maternity center in an inner-city in the US, and she has been extensively involved in women’s health issues both here and internationally, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South. Her book is an oral history of her ground-breaking center, as well as a deep dive into the racialized nature of maternal health care and a rousing cry for change.

Precarious times, phenomenal times. As protests for peace and freedom explode across the country and around the world, we’re searching for and finding democracy in the streets and in the campus encampments, in prison study groups and collectives of artists and writers. We’re honored tonight to be meeting up at our beloved Pilsen Community Books with Zeke Caligiuri, co-editor with a unique collective of incarcerated writers, for a discussion of their dazzling collection, American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion. While the class of people whose lives lack stability and security, and are increasingly dominated by uncertainty about our jobs and our incomes, our housing and our safety—about our futures—grows steadily and exponentially, it’s particularly illuminating to explore this political moment with the unseen and the unheard, the excluded and the marginalized, those deemed by power the leastwise of the land.

You may already know that 15 US governors recently rejected federal funds available for families who qualify for free school lunches that would provide $120 per child per month through the summer. If you forgot, I get it—your cruelty/stupidity quotient may have reached capacity, and your brain simply couldn’t accommodate one more item. We’re joined in conversation with Mark Nowak, an innovative and influential political poet, author of Social Poetics and Coal Mountain Elementary. His latest book, Again, takes its title from the last word in MAGA, and works its way through the four seasons, naming this political moment and urgently asking us to consider what the known demands of us now.