Mumia Abu-Jamal, a renowned Philadelphia journalist, has been incarcerated since 1981 for allegedly shooting police officer Daniel Faulkner. For years, he has received international support in his efforts to overturn his unjust conviction. This movement forced his removal from death row after almost thirty years, but he is still facing a life sentence. He cofounded the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party at age fifteen. Later, he was a radio reporter for stations WHYY and WHAT and became known as the “Voice of the Voiceless” for covering the city’s poor. He is the author of Live from Death Row, Death Blossoms, All Things Censored, Faith of Our Fathers, We Want Freedom, and Jailhouse Lawyers.
Tom Angotti is a professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center and directs the Center for Community Planning & Development (www.hunter.cuny.edu/ccpd). He is author of New York for Sale, The New Century of the Metropolis, Accidental Warriors, and other books. He coedits Progressive Planning magazine and remains actively engaged in struggles for environmental justice and the “right to the city.” He worked in government and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the 1960s.
William Ayers is formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois–Chicago and a founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society. His articles have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular journals. His books include Teaching Toward Freedom; A Kind and Just Parent; Fugitive Days; On the Side of the Child; Teaching the Personal and the Political; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (with Ryan Alexander-Tanner); Teaching Toward Democracy (with Kevin Kumashiro, Erica Meiners, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall); and Race Course (with Bernardine Dohrn).
Kazembe Balagun is a writer, cultural organizer, and communist who lives in the Bronx. He currently serves as director of education and outreach at the Brecht Forum in New York City and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Out New York, L Magazine, and the UK Guardian.
Ajamu Baraka is a longtime human rights activist and veteran of the Black Liberation Movement. He has been in the forefront of efforts to develop a radical, people-centered perspective on human rights and to apply it to social justice struggles. He was the founding director of the US Human Rights Network; serves on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Africa Action, and the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights; and is the board chair of the Latin American and Caribbean Community Center. He currently is working with the Black Left Unity Network, is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and is the editor of The Fight Must be for Human Rights: Voices from the Frontline.
Terry Bisson is a Hugo Award–winning science fiction writer who lives in California. A veteran of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (NY), he is the author of biographies of Nat Turner and Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as an alternative history of the Civil War, Fire on the Mountain, in which Harpers Ferry is a win. His latest novel, Any Day Now, is set in a 1968 that might have been.
Renate Bridenthal is a retired professor of history at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. She has coedited and contributed to various books: Becoming Visible: Women in European History (1977, 1987, 1998), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (1984), The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (2005), and the forthcoming The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption and States.
Since 1965, Leslie Cagan has worked in a wide range of peace and justice movements in New York and nationally. Her organizing skills have helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of people in public protest, including the million-person nuclear-disarmament march in New York in 1982, the historic lesbian/gay rights march on Washington in 1987, and the largest mobilizations against the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. Her major organizing projects have included efforts to normalize US-Cuba relations; she has also organized against police brutality and for budget equity. She led United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest coalition against the Iraq War. Her writings have appeared in nine anthologies and in scores of journals, newspapers, and online outlets.
Mat Callahan is a musician and author from San Francisco now residing in Bern, Switzerland. He composed and performed music with seminal world-beat band the Looters, whose success led to the founding of the artists’ collective Komotion International. For eleven years, Komotion was a center of radical art-making and revolutionary politics in San Francisco. Its performance space, art gallery, and sound magazine brought together artists and activists from around the world. He is now organizing a revival of James Connolly’s “Songs of Freedom.” He is the author of three books: Sex, Death and the Angry Young Man; Testimony; and The Trouble with Music. He can be contacted at info@matcallahan.com or www.matcallahan.com.
Clifford D. Conner is on the faculty of the School of Professional Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he teaches history. He is the author of A People’s History of Science (Nation Books, 2005) and has written biographies of two eighteenth-century Irish revolutionaries, Colonel Despard (2000) and Arthur O’Connor (2009). His most recent book, also a biography, is Jean Paul Marat (Pluto Press, 2012). He is also on the editorial board of The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (Blackwell, 2009).
Blanche Wiesen Cook is University Distinguished Professor of history and women’s studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her books include Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1978); The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare (Doubleday, 1981); and Eleanor Roosevelt, a three-volume biography (Viking-Penguin, vol. 1, 1992; vol. 2, 1999; vol. 3, forthcoming). She has also served as the American Historical Association’s vice president for research and on the boards of the Feminist Press and Science and Society. She cofounded the Peace History Society and the Fund for Open Information and Accountability, and is a life member of WILPF.
Angela Davis is an activist, writer, and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz. Her work as an educator—both at the university level and in the larger public sphere—has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of nine books; the most recent is The Meaning of Freedom. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison-industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the possibility of a future world without prisons and to help forge a twenty-first-century abolitionist movement.
Martín Espada is the author of more than fifteen books. His latest collection of poems, The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), received the Milt Kessler Award and an International Latino Book Award. His previous collection, The Republic of Poetry (Norton, 2006), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Espada teaches at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.
Dianne Feeley is active in Occupy Detroit’s eviction defense committee. A retired autoworker, she is a member of Autoworker Caravan, a group of rank-and-file autoworkers who oppose concessions and urge that idle factories be converted to produce mass transit and non-fossil-based energy. She is an editor of Against the Current, a bimonthly socialist magazine.
Harriet Fraad is a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. She publishes in Truthout, Tikkun, The Journal of Psychohistory, and Rethinking Marxism. Her recent book, Class Struggle on the Home Front, was written with Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff and edited by Graham Cassano. Harriet writes a regular blog with Richard Wolff, “Economy and Society,” at RDWolff.com/econ_psyc and on her own Web site, HarrietFraad.com.
Tess Fraad-Wolff, LMSW, CAT, is a psychotherapist at the Center for Psychological Well-Being in New York City. Her latest work, “Capitalist Profit and Intimate Life,” appeared in the Journal of Psychohistory, [winter 2013, (40): 1].
Frances Goldin heard the word “socialist” when she was eighteen and met her husband-to-be, Morris Goldin. It sounded like a great idea. She got married at twenty, when her activism began, and at age eighty-nine, it hasn’t stopped yet. In 1959, she helped organize New York’s Lower East Side community to beat city development czar Robert Moses and save the Cooper Square neighborhood and its thousands of residents from urban renewal. She founded The Frances Goldin Literary Agency almost forty years ago, and it’s still going strong, favoring books that help change the world. Now, she says, “Let’s free Mumia!”
Juan Gonzalez is a staff columnist for the New York Daily News and cohost of Democracy Now!, a daily morning news show broadcast by more than one thousand community and public radio and television stations. His investigative reports on the labor movement, the environment, race relations, and urban policy have garnered numerous accolades, including two George Polk Awards for commentary. He has written four books, including Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, and News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He was a leader of the Young Lords Party in the 1960s and of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights in the 1970s. He has also served as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Arun Gupta is a cofounder of The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal and former international news editor of the Guardian newsweekly. He is a contributor to The Guardian, Salon, The Progressive, Truthout, and Alternet, and has been profiled by Business Week, PBS, Wired, and The New York Times. He received a Wallace Global Fund grant for his work with the Occupy movement and is a Lannan writing fellow. He is a regular commentator on Democracy Now!, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Al Jazeera, and Russian Television. He is writing a book on the decline of American empire for Haymarket Books. He is also a graduate of the French Culinary Institute and cooked professionally in New York City.
Fred Jerome is the author of The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret War Against the World’s Most Famous Scientist (St. Martin’s Press, 2002), Einstein on Israel and Zionism (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), and, with Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2005). He has also written for Newsweek, Technology Review, and the New York Times. In the early 1960s, he covered the exploding civil rights movement in the South. His reporting from Cuba for the National Guardian earned him two subpoenas from the House Un-American Activities Committee and was subsequently denied a passport by the US State Department. In 1979, he created the Media Resource Service, a telephone referral service that enabled journalists to ask questions of more than 30,000 scientists. More recently, he has taught at the Columbia University School of Journalism, New York University, the New School, and the Brecht Forum.
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a writer, poet, activist, scholar, and teacher. She taught the first women’s studies course at the University of California–Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in comparative literature. She has taught Jewish studies, women’s studies, urban studies, race theory, public policy, and queer studies all over the United States. For five years she directed the Queens College/CUNY Worker Education Extension Center in Manhattan. Her books include The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism; The Issue Is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence, and Resistance; and My Jewish Face and Other Stories. She was the founding director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and cofounded Beyond the Pale, its program on Pacifica’s WBAI-FM.
Joel Kovel, originally trained as a physician and psychoanalyst, has played a leading role in the emerging ecosocialist movement through The Enemy of Nature (2002, 2007), editing the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism (2003–2011) and cofounding organizations such as Ecosocialist Horizons. His other books include History and Spirit (1991) and Overcoming Zionism (2007). In the 1980s, he began working with radical priests in Nicaragua, and in 2012 he formally converted to Christianity, joining the Episcopal Church.
Paul Le Blanc, a professor of history at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, has been active in various movements for social change since 1965. He is coauthor with Michael Yates of A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement for Economic Justice Today. His other books include Work and Struggle: Voices from US Labor Radicalism; Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization; and A Short History of the US Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century.
Dave Lindorff is a veteran award-winning investigative reporter and author. His first book, Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains (Bantam, 1992) explored the perverse effect of corporatization on this key part of the nation’s health-care system. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a two-time Fulbright scholar who has lived and worked in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, he has seen various health-care systems at work firsthand in these and many other countries. A freelance writer for the last thirty-three years, he is also founder of the online newspaper This Can’t Be Happening! at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
Michael Moore is an Academy Award–winning filmmaker and best-selling author. His films Fahrenheit 9/11; Capitalism: A Love Story; Bowling for Columbine; and SiCKO are among the all-time top ten grossing documentaries. His most recent book is Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life. His Web site is www.michaelmoore.com.
Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the City University of New York Graduate Center. Together with Richard Cloward, she is the author of Regulating the Poor, Poor People’s Movements, Why Americans Still Don’t Vote, Challenging Authority, and Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?
Michael Ratner is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and is chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He and CCR are the attorneys in the United States for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He is still trying to get the Guantanamo prison camp closed, end the indefinite-detention scheme it spawned, and tear down the wall of impunity around officials who ran the torture program there. He is coauthor of several books, most recently Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America (2011) and Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder (2011). The National Law Journal named him one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States.
Ronald Reosti was born in Detroit in 1938. His parents, both from Italy, imparted to him a working-class identity, a sense of social justice, a belief in the possibility of social change, a commitment to democracy, and a hatred of the undemocratic ruling class. He embraced socialism in his early teens, during the McCarthy era, and has remained committed to its principles. For the last forty-eight years he has practiced law and been part of the radical community in Detroit. He looks forward to a vibrant socialist movement to win the millions yearning for an alternative to the inequitable and destructive capitalist system.
Debby Smith has been a socialist since going to college in Boston in the radical sixties provided the atmosphere that encouraged her to question all of society’s assumptions. She worked full-time for the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Kent State Legal Defense Fund, and in the feminist, union, and socialist movements. She is a longtime supporter of the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School. She participates in the anti-capitalist and pro-democracy movements that are growing so rapidly in the United States and worldwide.
Michael Steven Smith is a New York City attorney and author. His most recent book, written with Michael Ratner, is Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder. He is on the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, where he learned social history from the great teacher Harvey Goldberg. He has testified on Palestinian rights before committees of the US Congress and the United Nations. He cohosts the radio show Law and Disorder (lawanddisorder.org) on WBAI-FM with Michael Ratner and Heidi Boghosian. He lives with his wife, Debby, and talking parrot, Charlie Parker.
Paul Louis Street is a researcher, writer, and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010); and, with Anthony DiMaggio, Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011).
Steven Wishnia has worked as an editor, reporter, proofreader, substitute teacher, taxi driver, photographer, and musician. He has written and/or edited for numerous national magazines (High Times, PC, Junior Scholastic) and leftist publications (Alternet.org, the Progressive, the Nation, the Indypendent, the late Guardian newsweekly, and the New York housing monthly Tenant/Inquilino). He has won two awards for his reporting on New York housing issues. Bass player and cofounder of the 1980s punk-rock band False Prophets (CD reissue: Blind Roaches and Fat Vultures, Alternative Tentacles), he still plays music quasi-professionally. He is the author of When the Drumming Stops, a novel (Manic D Press, 2012); Exit 25 Utopia, a short-story collection, and The Cannabis Companion. His Web site is www.stevenwishnia.com.
Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, is a visiting professor at New School University in New York. His recent publications include Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, with David Barsamian (2012); Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with Stephen Resnick (2012); and Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (2012). He hosts Economic Update weekly on WBAI-FM. He writes regularly for the Guardian and Truthout.org and has been interviewed on Democracy Now!, The Charlie Rose Show, Alternative Radio, and many other programs. The New York Times Magazine named him “America’s most prominent Marxist economist.” His work can be found at rdwolff.com and democracyatwork.info.
Michael Zweig is a professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of Working-Class Life at Stony Brook University. His most recent books are The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (Cornell University Press, 2012), and What’s Class Got to Do with It: American Society in the Twenty-first Century (Cornell University Press, 2004). He was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society and the Union for Radical Political Economics. He is active in his union, United University Professions (American Federation of Teachers) and has been named “citizen of the year” by The Suffolk Times for his writing and community organizing on eastern Long Island.