Aruni Kashyap, Madhuri Sastry and Bhakti Shringarpure discuss the rapidly increasing presence of AI which is causing a cognitive vertigo. Love it, hate it, need it or resist it, there is no denying that the pervasive presence of AI in all aspects of life has caused an upheaval. It is easy to denounce the use of AI in technologies of warfare and to rail against the environmentally disastrous AI data centers but when it comes to the worlds of research and creativity, the lines blur rather too quickly. Even as Google or Siri or Alexa are integrated into our lives, is it wrong to have ChatGPT or Claude take our projects a few steps further? How far is too far? Do you even recall consenting to this technology on our phones, cars, homes and computers? At the Radical Books Collective, we are concerned with how AI impacts reading, writing, publishing and pedagogy but more importantly, we want to engage with its moral and ethical dimensions. We may not have answers or solutions but we will ask the right questions.

Aruni Kashyap is a writer, translator, and academic. He is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. He has edited the story collection How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency and is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia (Athens).

Madhuri Sastry is a writer and editor with a background in human rights law. She is the Culture Editor at The Polis Project and has written for Bitch Media, Slate, Catapult and Guernica, among several other publications.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective.

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A conversation between Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Bhakti Shringarpure about her novel At Sea.

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At Sea is propulsive novel of ambition, greed, and the deadly fury of Mother Nature, as a female driller takes charge of an isolated offshore oil rig with an entirely male crew. When Zainab, an expert driller, is tasked with overseeing a high-stakes oil rig operation, she leaves behind her pregnant sister to embark on the most challenging assignment of her career. But there’s a catch. The rig is teetering on the edge of disaster—and Zainab is the only woman among a crew of hardened men who want absolutely nothing to do with her. At the helm, but forced to prove herself at every turn, Zainab investigates the issues that have plagued the operation. When all her warnings are ignored, she quickly grasps that the real danger may lie in the cold calculations and base desires of the men determined to finish the operation as quickly and cheaply as possible. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, Zainab races to prevent the looming catastrophe that threatens the rig, the lives of the crew and the welfare of the sea before it’s too late.

About the author: Born in Sudan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s first job as a teenager was in a coal mine in rural Australia. After graduating with first-class honours in Mechanical Engineering, Abdel-Magied trained and worked as an MWD (Measurement While Drilling) contractor and drilling engineer. She is a also screenwriter and award-winning social advocate. Abdel-Magied’s debut literary novel At Sea was a Dua lipa Service95 ‘Must Read’ for 2026. Previous titles include action packed teen fantasy Silverbrook: Yumna and the Golden Horse, the essay collection Talking About A Revolution and two novels for younger readers, You Must Be Layla and the award-winning Listen, Layla. She is currently a writer on British continuing drama Emmerdale and her original drama series Cruise Control is in development with the BBC. Abdel-Magied is the creator of Keep Eyes on Sudan and adviser on the Sudan Digital Archive. She is dedicated to the civilian movement in Sudan and the celebration and amplification of Sudanese culture. Follow her on Instagram and on Good Chat with Yassmin Abdel-Magied on Substack.

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A live book club chat about The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World (Haymarket Books, 2026) by Vicky Osterweil. Moderated by Sherry Zane.

About the book: A provocative history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance, pulling skeletons from the corporate closet to decode the political messages hidden in all of your favorite childhood movies. In The Extended Universe, Vicky Osterweil takes us on a quest to discover how Disney’s “imagineers” have made it impossible to reflect on the wonders of growing up without thinking of Disney’s movies, amusement parks, and merchandising. Drawing on extensive interviews with filmmakers, screenwriters, union organizers, and Disney “adults” alike, Osterweil unearths reactionary political commitments and maleficent legal maneuvers so cartoonishly evil they would make one of Walt’s own animated villains blush. Along the way, Osterweil braids together corporate skullduggery with a not entirely unsympathetic analysis of some of Disney’s most famous movies. The result is an entertaining and convincing case that Disney’s entire business model has been built upon a ruthless and fanatical insistence on intellectual property rights—from Steamboat Willie to Avengers: Infinity War and beyond! Buy the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

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About the author: Vicky Osterweil is a Philadelphia-based writer, agitator, and worker whose first book, In Defense of Looting, described historical struggles for liberation in the US. She is a member of the anarchist journal CAW and has written about the intersections of film, politics, and culture for publications such as The Paris Review, Art in America, Al Jazeera America, The Baffler, Dissent, Lux Magazine, and The New Inquiry, where she was also a culture editor for many years.

About the moderator: Sherry Zane is a historian, cultural critic and scholar whose research explores the intersection of visual culture, public memory, and feminist historiography. Her recent essay Michael Jackson, Palestine and the Erasure of Solidarity was published on Radical Books Collective. Her article “’I Did It for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919–1921” was published in the New England Quarterly in 2018 and has since been featured in The MIT Press Reader and 19th News. She writes at The Lioness Archive substack:

The Lioness Archive’s Substack

Feminist Writings from a Canceled Academic

By Sherry Zane

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A book discussion on Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think by Ainehi Edoro. Moderated by Bhakti Shringarpure.

About the book: Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

About the author: Ainehi Edoro is a Nigerian literary scholar who focuses on African literature and digital culture. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture, and faculty of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Buy the book here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/forest-imaginaries/9780231565073

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Poet and writer Otoniya J. Okot Bitek joins Bhakti Shringarpure to speak about her novel We, The Kindling. A beautifully assembled symphony of women’s voices breathes life into the cruel, two-decades history of the war waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Okot Bitek says that in a way she has always been working on this novel even if her first poetry collection might have been about genocide in neighboring Rwanda, and that it took her almost 15 years to be able to take stock of the difficult material emerging from this period. The question of form was crucial since Okot Bitek did not want to generate a portrait of battered and victimized women nor offer pornographic accounts of violence. Okot Bitek also discusses the dilemmas around bearing witness, doing justice to memory and the imperative to always move against forgetting and erasure.

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek writes poetry and fiction. Her first collection, 100 Days, won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second collection, A is for Acholi, won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection of poetry, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Otoniya was born in Kenya to Ugandan parents and has lived in Canada for more than three decades. Her short story “Going Home” received a special mention in the 2004 Commonwealth Short Fiction Prize. We, the Kindling is her first novel.

Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative director of Radical Books Collective.

Writer Hamza Koudri joins host Bhakti Shringarpure from Algiers to talk about his debut novel Sand Roses. A historical novel about the semi-nomadic Ouled Nail group in Algeria, it focuses on the women who are trained as dancers—but are also forced into sex work by the community at an early age. The novel follows twin sisters, dancers Salima and Fahima, who eke out a living in the town of Bousaada at the height of French colonialism, and inadvertently find themselves at the center of the violence of the French army. Koudri belongs to a small but growing community of Algerian writers who have begun to embrace English language and culture. Even then, the concerns of his novel remain firmly Algerian as it is situated in a distinctly anti-colonial historical moment against the French while also excavating the forgotten history of the Ouled Nail community.

In this conversation, Koudri speaks about the thriving Algerian literary scene and how a random podcast led him down a research rabbit hole about the Ouled Nail community. He discussed the limits and delimits of the representing violence, especially against women. Lastly, he talked about the actual desert curiosity that the novel is named after: a sand rose.

This interview was originally published at The Polis Project. You can read and watch it here: https://www.thepolisproject.com/read/interview-hamza-koudri-sand-roses/

Hamza Koudri is an Algerian writer whose debut novel Sand Roses was shortlisted for the Island Prize in 2022. He holds an MA in English Literature and Civilization and has been working in education and international development since 2008. He is based in Algeiers and currently serves as the Country Director with the British Council in Algeria.

Bhakti Shringarpure is writer and editor who co-founded Warscapes magazine and is now creative director of the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and recently co-edited Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War.

Ainehi Edoro (Brittle Paper) and Bhakti Shringarpure (Radical Books Collective) discuss about the controversial New York Times' "100 Best Books of the Century list." A grandiose list claiming to represent the world and a diversity of voices, it happens to have 66 books by American and primarily white writers and only two African books, four Asian books and only 13 translated works. Ainehi and Bhakti explore what this means for the representation of the last 25 years of publishing in English. Originally streamed on Instagram Live

They ask:

Why are lists so captivating yet controversial?

How do lists shape our understanding of literary excellence?

Why do only two African books make the list, and what does this say about cultural bias?

How are culture and politics deeply entwined?

What harm does such cultural erasure produce?

What does it mean to leave out the entire Arab and Middle Eastern world of literature?

How can we highlight more diverse voices in literature?

Ainehi Edoro is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches and researches on African literature, political theory, and literature in social media. Edoro is the founder and Editor of Brittle Paper (https://brittlepaper.com/), a leading online platform dedicated to African writing and literary culture. 

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and the creative director of Radical Books Collective.

Writing about war is often synonymous with writing about memory. Erasing narratives, stories and collective memory is the explicit agenda and the inevitable outcome of any war. And thus, writers counter, resist and seize back memory and along the way, shape the historical accounts of places and people that have experienced violence and trauma. The discussion explores the task of writers retrieving memories from war but through the double focus on gender and colonial pasts. They ask: what is the role of the imagination in writing against forgetfulness? How does form, style and aesthetics enter into the writing of trauma and violence? Where does imagination take you within the memory frame of your stories? How can imagination be a place to resist annihilation, how can imagination be a tool for liberation?

Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic U.S. literatures at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war in U.S. literature, she has edited or coedited four volumes and authored critical essays on works by Naomi Shihab Nye, Brian Turner, and Nora Okja Keller that consider their engagement with war from a feminist perspective. Her article, “Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics,” appears in the Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (2016). Samina has also published over thirty creative nonfiction essays, which often meld memoir with political commentary. These essays appear in Warscapes, The Margins, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir “One Summer in Gaza” was reprinted recently in Doubleback Review, and her essay on Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation is forthcoming in The Markaz Review. Samina spent her childhood in England and grew up in Pakistan.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah was born in Verona to a Somali father and an Italian mother. She grew up in Mogadishu but fled to Europe at the outbreak of the civil war. She is a writer, an oral historian and performer, and a teacher. She has published stories and poems in several anthologies, and in 2006 she won the Lingua Madre National Literary Prize. Her novel Madre piccola (2007) was awarded a Vittorini Prize and has been translated into English as Little Mother (Indiana University Press, 2011). Il Comandante del fiume was published by 66thand2nd in 2014.

Beverly Parayno is a second-generation Filipina raised in San Jose, California. She is the author of the short story collection WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press, 2023), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist and winner of a 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal. Parayno is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She serves on the board of the San Francisco-based literary arts nonprofit Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) and the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland. Parayno lives in Cameron Park, California, where she co-facilitates the Cameron Park Library Writers Workshop.

Buy Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War.

What is the poet’s role in the event of the erasure of an entire people? Even as we deem certain acts of violence as “unspeakable” and “indescribable”? As the refrain “no words left” rings in our ears, many of us find ourselves seeking solace or sense from poetic language. Poetry and poets have long been understood (and also wilfully misunderstood) for the ability to deploy resistance to silence and to complicity. More than ever, words matter and words provide witness. Meg Arenberg will speak with poets Jehan Bseiso and Otonya J. Okot Bitek about their respective writing practice, their sense of poetry’s role in a violent world, the value of poetry in the face of numbing horrors, and their specific work putting words to the unspeakable in Palestine and Rwanda.

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her 100 Days (University of Alberta 2016) a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the 2017 National Magazine Awards for Poetry in Canada. Her poem “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and is the title of her most recent work, a chapbook with the same title from Nomados Press (2019). She is an assistant professor of Black Creativity at Queen’s University in Kingston, which occupies the lands of the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee people. Otoniya’s work has been published widely online, in print and in literary magazines.

Jehan Bseiso is a poet, researcher, and aid worker. Her poetry has been published on several online platforms. Her co-authored book I Remember My Name is the Palestine Book Awards winner in the creative category (2016). She is the co-editor of Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees (2019). Jehan has been working with Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders since 2008.

Meg Arenberg is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Humanities and the African Languages and Translation Program at the Africa Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University Bloomington in 2016. Prior to joining the Africa Institute, she completed postdoctoral research positions in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the African Humanities Colloquium at Princeton University. Arenberg is a scholar of 20th and 21st-century African literatures with particular research interests in intertextuality, Kiswahili poetics, translation studies, and digital media.

Buy the book: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war

War brings the experiences and stories of health, health workers and emergency medicine into sharp focus. When one speaks about the horrors of war, it is primarily a reference to the vulnerability of bodies that are being deliberately targeted for harm irrespective of whether these are civilians or military personnel. Legal frameworks exist to protect health workers and hospitals, and to prioritize the rights of the wounded and sick no matter what side of the hostilities they may be on. Yet, attacks on health workers and the destruction of hospitals make the practice of care incredibly difficult and only exacerbate precarity. Even outside of the space of the war zone, the practice of health and healing can be a fraught and embattled world where marginalized populations navigate hostile and unjust societal structures that are not designed to provide them with equitable care. This discussion explore the complex ways in which these experiences can be written about by addressing their own positionality as women and as insiders/outsiders, the challenges of bearing witness, and the traumas that arise from doing this work.

Zahra Moloo is a Kenyan investigative journalist, researcher, and documentary filmmaker. Her work focuses on biodiversity, the extractive industries and neoliberalism in Africa. She has published in Al Jazeera, BBC Focus on Africa, Jacobin, Africa is a Country, Project Syndicate, Warscapes magazine, IRIN News, and in the collection Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession (Zed Books, 2017). She currently works for the ETC Group and is directing a documentary on conservation in Central Africa. She holds a BA in History and Development Studies from McGill University and an MA in Broadcast Journalism from City University in London.

Valérie Gruhn is a clinician, humanitarian, public health specialist, and author with over a decade of experience in global health and humanitarian response. She began her career as a registered nurse. Valérie's humanitarian work spans continents, with significant contributions in the Middle East, East and Central Africa, and beyond. She has worked with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Iraq during the Mosul Battle, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the Ebola Outbreak, and in Chad, addressing nutrition and refugee emergencies, as well as in projects in Kenya and Yemen. Additionally, Valérie has contributed as an assistant researcher on projects investigating human rights violations during the Syrian War. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she played a pivotal role in the response in New York City. Her writings have been featured in various online magazines, and her piece "Mosul Journal" was notably selected for inclusion in the book compilation Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War. Her expertise and insights have been shared on platforms such as the Council on Foreign Relations and France-Atlanta. Valérie is dedicated to amplifying the voices of vulnerable populations through her advocacy and firsthand experiences.

Danielle Villasana is an independent photojournalist whose documentary work focuses on human rights, women, identity, displacement, and health around the world. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibits and has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, and The Washington Post, among others. She contributes to Redux and is a member of the groups Women Photograph and Diversify Photo. Her first photo book, A Light Inside, was published in 2018 by FotoEvidence. In 2019 she co-founded We, Women, an ongoing platform exploring crucial issues across the U.S. through photo-based community engagement projects by women, transgender, and non-binary artists.

Gaslighting is a term used to describe the process by which a person is manipulated into questioning their own reality. Defined as a "conscious intent to brainwash," gaslighting is understood as occurring primarily in interpersonal situations of domestic abuse. Victims of gaslighting find themselves questioning their sense of reality as well as their memories; they experience high levels of anxiety and they may begin to lose trust and confidence in themselves. Gaslighting can happen in several different ways: denial, mockery, jokes and trivialization, withholding information, stereotyping, and repetitively countering observations and memories. 

Without doubt, gaslighting becomes an important concept to understand the feelings, stories and experiences of women, queer, transgender and racialized individuals. As the #MeToo movement grew with hashtags such as #BelieveHer trending, many of the narratives pointed to victims being told for years that they had misread a situation or were overthinking flirtatious advances. Victims of gaslighting found themselves feeling increasingly guilty and wondering if they were responsible for having caused their own abuse and trauma. Increasingly, the phrase "structural gaslighting" has also come into use to explain the effect of ingrained, harmful stereotypes that refuse engagement with marginalized people and continually dismiss their views, beliefs and ideas. Those that challenge the status quo are deemed abnormal, as exaggerating the problem, and often as imagining things. Women are told to "lighten up;" Black women are told they are "too angry;" individuals wishing to emphasize their pronouns are deemed as pushy and petty; migrants are often accused of not trying hard enough to assimilate; the list of such harms is long and the effects of these societal and political abuses is manifold. This is a timely topic because many of us who are deeply concerned about the unfolding horrors in Palestine are being gaslit constantly not only in our own domestic and work environments but also on a broader level by the media and by politicians. Panelists will unpack gaslighting on interpersonal levels but also something that disproportionately affects marginalized individuals and communities, and will try to come up with clear ways to resist these structures and preserve one's self-confidence, moral compass. and belief systems.

Suzy Salamy is a social worker and a filmmaker. She has an extensive history of working in the television and film world and has worked on several award-winning documentaries about the Middle East. Suzy has worked at the NYC Anti-Violence Project providing crisis intervention, counseling, and advocacy to LGBTQ and HIV affected survivors of violence. She received her B.A. in film from Bard College and Masters in Social Work from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, CUNY.

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her first book, The Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is the co-author of How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (2023) which offers a lens into today's India through the lived experiences of political prisoners.

Bhakti Shringarpure is an Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Baruch College (CUNY), Stern College for Women, and the University of Nairobi. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a multi-faceted community building project that creates an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018)and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).

Buy the book: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war

Wars, conflict and histories of violence have been continually framed as binary narratives between winners and losers, nation and non-nations, and armies and non-armies. Additionally, in a saturated media landscape, violence and war is often represented as a form of entertainment and this generates a numbness about suffering, pain as well as the psychological and material costs of loss. Prevalent narratives of neutrality, both-sideism and objectivity can legitimize violence towards certain groups of people. Panelists with extensive teaching experience discuss ways in which war can be unlearned in the classroom and disrupt existing ways of producing knowledge about war.

Sherry Zane is a Professor in Residence and the Director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her main research interests include the history of gender, race, sexuality, and U.S. national security. She is the author of, “’I did it for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919-1921” in the New England Quarterly (2018). She is currently researching art activism in Belfast in Northern Ireland and also working on a feminist pedagogical project to make classroom experiences more inclusive.

Veruska Cantelli is Associate Professor in the Core Division at Champlain College. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo and also taught Comparative Literature at Queens College, CUNY with a focus on literature of war and women's autobiographies, particularly on non-western narratives of the self. She is the translator of Lettere Rivoluzionarie by Diane di Prima (2021), and the author of "The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko's Stage of Reprobates" in Otherness: Essays and Studies (2021), "The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings" for the Journal of International Women's Studies (2017) as well as several articles and interviews for Warscapes magazine. She is the co-editor of Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press) and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press).

Bhakti Shringarpure is an Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Baruch College (CUNY), Stern College for Women, and the University of Nairobi. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a multi-faceted community building project that creates an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018), Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).

Buy the book here: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war

Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023)

Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.

Nadine El-Hadi is senior acquisitions editor at American University in Cairo Press. She runs both the press’s Arabic Language Learning List as well as its fiction imprint, Hoopoe Press.

Farah is the winner of the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, Lettre Ulysses Award, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Premio Cavour and St. Malo Literature Festival Prize, among others. In this conversation, writer and editor Bhakti Shringarpure of the Radical Books collective speaks with Farah about his life, his prolific writing career, his penchant for stylistic experimentation and what it means to be a writer whose works become representative of a country and its people, both in Somalia and abroad.

This conversation was hosted by Melahuset in Oslo (Norway) on September 28, 2023 to a live audience.

Miano is an important literary and media figure in Cameroon and France, and is known for her provocative feminist and anticolonial ideas and for her exploration and embrace of the concept of the Afropean identity. In this podcast, Miano tells the story of how she became a writer and speaks of her interest in the question of African origins for black communities in the Americas and Europe. She also touches upon the issue of belonging for Africans abroad, all of which are recurrent topics in her fiction and essays. Pierrot and Miano discuss the freedoms and limits of terms such as Afropean, Francophonie and contending with a glossary of Black identities. 

Greg Pierrot is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut (Stamford) and the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture and Decolonize Hipsters. 

Margot Atwell is a writer, editor, publisher, and community funding expert and before taking on the executive director role at Feminist Press just over a year ago, she directed publishing at Kickstarter and also worked previously at the independent publisher Beaufort Books, and founded and ran the micropress Gutpunch. Margot is the coauthor of The Insider’s Guide to Book Publishing Success (from Beaufort Books) and Derby Life: A Crash Course in the Incredible Sport of Roller Derby (from Gutpunch Press). 

Meg Arenberg is the managing editor for the Radical Books Collective.

Elizabeth Méndez Berry is Vice President and Executive Editor of One World, an imprint of Random House in New York. She is an award-winning writer and editor who writes about culture, gender, criminal justice and politics, and has also co-founded several philanthropic institutes.

Porscha Burke has revolutionized publishing in her fifteen years at Random House. She has worked with authors such as Maya Angelou and Reverend Amy Butler, and has led the publication of new editions of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Black Book that were originally edited by Toni Morrison. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College, where she currently teaches book proposal writing.

Margaret Busby is a Ghanaian born writer, editor and broadcaster. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she co-founded the publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She has edited the Daughters of Africa anthology and the second New Daughters of Africa anthology. She was awarded the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement award in 2021 and the CBE, and she is a member of The Royal Society of Literature. She was appointed the president of English PEN in 2023.

Ellah P. Wakatama was born in Zimbabwe, educated in the US and has been a London-based writer and editor for the past many years. She is editor-at-large at Canongate Books and chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She has edited several anthologies and has contributed to several of them as well. She was given an OBE for services to the publishing industry in 2011, and New African Magazine also named her one of “100 Most Influential Africans” in 2016.

The report is divided into 5 parts. The first section offers a snapshot of the transitions taking place in the industry, and the crisis around racism and diversity exposed and expressed due to the uprisings for Black lives that began in 2020. The second section addresses the lack of diversity among the staff, editors and executives in the publishing world which then limits the types of books being acquired, produced and sold. In this long section, there are shocking revelations about hostile work environments, reported micro-aggressions, and the practice of typecasting editors and authors of color. The third section tackles pervasive prejudices such as “diverse books don’t sell” or that certain communities of color “don’t read” or the notion that one book per community of color is “enough.” Writers of color are trapped because they “are not only damned if they tell stories that white gatekeepers wrongly believe they've already read—they're also damned if they don't tell stereotypical stories that white publishers actually have already read and expect.” The fourth and fifth sections deal with questions of sales, marketing and promotion practices that continually disadvantage authors of color. 

Bhakti Shringarpure and Suchitra Vijayan are both writers and co-founded the Radical Books Collective. 

Read the PEN America report: https://pen.org/report/race-equity-and-book-publishing/

Other links:

#PublishingPaidMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PublishingPaidMe

#WeNeedDiverseBooks https://diversebooks.org/

Archive Editor Erin Overby's thread on racism at the New Yorker: https://twitter.com/erinoverbey/status/1437767832159277058