Captive Genders
Edited by Nat Smith and Eric A. Stanley
  - Thursday, September 8
  - 7 PM

Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. In the first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.

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ATTA
Jarett Kobek
  - Thursday, September 22
  - 7 PM

Ours is a century of fear. Governments and mass media bombard us with words and images: desert radicals, "rogue states," jihadists, WMDs, existential enemies of freedom. We labor beneath myths that neither address nor describe the present situation, monstrous deceptions produced by a sound bite society. There is no reckoning of actuality, no understanding of the individual lives that inaugurated this echo chamber. In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master's thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the"Islamic-Oriental city." Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history's great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. Joined in this volume by a second work, "The Whitman of Tikrit"--a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein's last day before capture--ATTA is a brutal, relentless, and ultimately fearless corrective to ten years of propaganda and pandering.

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Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood
Edited by Tomas Moniz and Jeremy Adam Smith
  - Thursday, September 29
  - 7 PM

Today more than ever, fatherhood demands constant improvisation, risk, and struggle. With grace and honesty and strength, Rad Dad’s writers tackle all the issues that other parenting guides are afraid to touch: the brutalities, beauties, and politics of the birth experience, the challenges of parenting on an equal basis with mothers, the tests faced by transgendered and gay fathers, the emotions of sperm donation, and parental confrontations with war, violence, racism, and incarceration. Rad Dad is for every father out in the real world trying to parent in ways that are loving, meaningful, authentic, and ultimately revolutionary.

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