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Book launch with launch celebration with Kelly Hayes, Eman Abdelhadi and Atena O. Danner.

Join Pilsen Community Books for the launch of Hayes's new book Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis.

In social movements, some heartbreaks are all but inevitable. Campaigns will be lost. Mental health crises will occur. Social ills, like gender-based violence, will manifest themselves in movement spaces. People will experience profound personal losses. Grief, alienation, and despair can grind us under. Sometimes, we need accompaniment. Sometimes, we need to be met where we’re at by a caring voice of experience. Read This When Things Fall Apart is a care package for activists and organizers building power under fascistic, demoralizing conditions. It’s an outstretched hand, offering history lessons, personal anecdotes, and practical advice about how to navigate the woes of justice work. A survival guide for the heart, this is a book for activists to keep close, and to share with co-strugglers in need.

Personal, reflective, and hopeful, Read This When Things Fall Apart harnesses the writers' individual moments of despair into living, breathing wisdom that chips away at the supposed inevitability of fascist life. Restorative like a letter from a trusted friend and invigorating like a story from a mentor, the book is an indispensable companion for all of us navigating challenging times. Featuring letters from Mariame Kaba, Ashon Crawley, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eman Abdelhadi, Brian Merchant, and more.

Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator and photographer. They host Truthout’s podcast Movement Memos and are co-author of the book Let This Radicalize You, with Mariame Kaba. Hayes is also the creator of Organizing My Thoughts, a weekly newsletter about politics and justice work.

Eman Abdelhadi (she/they) is an organizer, writer, and scholar based in Chicago. She is coauthor of the revolutionary sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). Abdelhadi is a sociologist and assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where her research focuses on migration, gender, and Muslim communities. She cofounded the Salon Kawakib collective, and she organizes with Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

Atena O. Danner is a cultural worker who imagines Black liberation, engaged in boundless curiosity. As a poet, singer, and visual artist, Atena creates work that encompasses kitchen-table specificity and folk story relatability, covering topics including neurodiversity, human connection, and collective liberation. As an organizer and activist, she has worked to incorporate struggles for justice into her life as a caregiver in a family of complex needs while also writing and publishing in journals, anthologies, and her own book of poetry, Incantations for Rest: Poems, Meditations & Other Magic (Skinner House, 2022), which was awarded a Nautilus Silver Award for poetry in 2023.