Join members of the Beehive Collective for a special presentation, discussion storytelling, and movement art. The Beehive Collective has been active for over 25 years making art and engaging in popular education to challenge corporate colonialism. They are best known for creating intricately detailed pen and ink murals in collaboration with directly impacted communities over the course of many years. These graphics, rich with nature metaphors, become the centrepiece of educational campaigns aimed at cross-pollinating movements for social, economic, and environmental justice. One of these graphics, "The True Cost of Coal" has been adapted into a rhyming kids book.
Benjamin Heim Shepard, Laurie Wen
The theme of the 2025 Howard Zinn Book Fair, “Fight Supremacy: Actions Against Authoritarianism”, looks to the past for insight into how we can effectively organize today. We draw inspiration from abolitionists, Indigenous resistance movements, organized labor, the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and LGBTQ+ Rights Movements, Occupy Wall Street, and the countless groups and individuals who continue to take to the streets in defiance of autocracy. With this in mind, Lynn Lewis and Benjamin Shepard propose a panel on ways to remember and connect movements, in order to learn from the past to inform our current and future organizing and movement building work. Oral history is a method to trace through lines between movements, ever-evolving from labor to civil rights, to housing and healthcare, to AIDS and queer, autonomous movements. We will share our work, rooted in activism and oral history, and engage participants to imagine what an oral history process would look like in their work. Building on his new book On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies and Conflicts, Shepard explores conflict and resolution as the lifeblood of social movements. How, and with whom, do we find lasting friendship, support, and joy in a world in need of so much repair
Tongo-Eisen Martin, Mike Dunn, Ananda Esteva, Jenny Worley
Fascists, authoritarians, and capitalists exploit existing prejudices and bigotries within marginalized communities to divide them and get them fighting among each other. They exploit these bigotries to disrupt their movements and their solidarity, and to reduce their effectiveness. In this workshop, several working-class writers will read excerpts from their books, and then discuss how their books address the bigotries and prejudices within particular marginalized communities, particularly in otherwise progressive communities, and how activists or characters in their books worked to overcome these bigotries. And they will discuss how these experiences apply to conditions today.
Carmelo Castro-Netsky and Julian Mithra
Be inspired to facilitate an accessible and inclusive community arts project through the case study of a mural developed and installed at the Ed Roberts Campus in South Berkeley, a hub for disability justice work. Through core principles, like slowness and emergent structure, attendees will accompany us through a circuitous path from concept to design to production to installation. The discussion harmonizes wisdom from community arts engagement (without a legacy of accessibility) and the collective wisdom from a cohort of artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities (who haven’t always been empowered in self-representation). What are the cognitive, creative, and construction tools that help interrupt capitalist demands for efficiency, expertise, or verbal communication? Join us to think critically about our relationship with each other and our bodies, nourishing the soil in which civic engagement grows by acquiring hands-on strategies for a site-specific project whose process and product are both accessible.
Aisha Nizar, Oakland People's Arms Embargo, Peter Olney, ILWU (retired), Sam Levens, Inlandboatmen's Union (IBU-ILWU) Gifford Hartman, Labor Studies Laney College
Building power for workers always involves building their agency and commitment. Such power is enhanced by a sophisticated understanding of production systems and logistics supply chains. This workshop will bring to bear the experiences of veteran organizers to identify choke points and key points of leverage that can enable workers to win. Historically, workers have used that power to stop arms from being sent to warzones, such as in 1980 when ILWU militants refused to send armaments to El Salvador or recently when millions of Italian workers and students went on strike, in solidarity with Gaza, to prevent weapons from being shipped to Israel.
Dr. Joel Eis
All workshop participants will be part of making 1-3 person short guerilla theatre sketches. they will then go out into the general courtyard and perform them for the people there. No experience needed, no special clothing needed.
Sheela Ivlev, Dr. Lateef McLeod, Leroy F.Moore Jr., Nida Liftawiya
Across movements and borders, disabled communities of color have long resisted colonialism, racism, and ableism—not through institutions, but through each other. This panel shares global perspectives on what care looks like when systems abandon—or actively target—our communities.
Panelists will share stories where people have built liberatory forms of care with limited resources. We’ll explore how global disability justice movements are fighting co-optation, resisting supremacist systems, and reclaiming storytelling, culture, and healing as tools of resistance. This session is meant to spark action in building collective care grounded in resistance—not reform. It’s not about inclusion, it’s about liberation!
Ariel Gore and Jessica Lawless
Following in the tradition of David Wojnarowicz, Audre Lorde, Leslie Feinberg, Dorothy Allison and so many more, we will look at memoir as a queer strategy of resistance against the violent systems designed to erase us. We think about writing and reading books as a radical act that creates intimate spaces of solidarity while fighting against the complicity required by the systems that profit from our suffering. We will read from our recent memories that weave together personal loss with structural critique—one examining queer love against the cancer industrial complex, one tracing a path through three decades of left activism and the connections between interpersonal violence and institutional oppression—we'll consider: How to fight supremacy while also trying to survive it; Writing as an historical record and vehicle for imagining a liberatory future; Grief and love as forms of resistance; Maintaining our humanity within dehumanizing systems; Interconnected creative practices (visual art, writing, culinary arts, music etc) as an anchor for surviving the end of empire. The session will be moderated include participatory discussion with time to write, draw, and color as a temporary affinity group.
Rosa del Duca, Eddie Falcon, Shiloh Emelein, and Roberta Stern
America's "economic draft" is alive and well, with military recruiters preying on young, disadvantaged, idealistic teens to fill the ranks. But often times "serving" your country means abandoning your moral compass, from misguided forever wars to helping ICE terrorize hardworking people. Hear from anti-war veterans in the "Truth in Recruitment" movement, working to get teens vital information before signing that eight-year contract. Get informed so you can help the next generation say "no" to a toxic, authoritarian system built on exploitation.
Join Duo Pizzicato and guests for a short set of Italian roots music played on mandolin, guitar, tamburello, and castanets. Mid-set, please plan to join in on a participatory singalong of Bella Ciao in English, Italian, and Spanish (with the lyrics, translations, and song info provided so everyone can join).
Rickey Vincent and T. Watts
Discussion along with clips of music that inspired the Black Power/Black Arts movement with members of The Scribes of Heru, music journalists Rickey Vincent, author of Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music, and T. Watts, author of Time Has Come: Revelations of a Mississippi Hippie (w/Lester Chambers).
Steps to Stand Strong and Build Collective Safety in the Shadow of the “Antifa” Order
Learn about the legal mechanisms behind Trump’s repression works, breaking down the use of expanding “emergency” powers, the relationship of recent prosecutions of protestors, to justify the repurposing of statutes to deploy the national guard and military domestically.The last 30 minutes will transition to participants editing two collaborative community readiness documents, where participants can share resources on collective safety strategies that reduce risk in order to sustain and embolden organizing.
Po Poets/authors/talk-storytellers : Tiny, Leroy Moore, Junebug , Dee Allen , Muteado , Alvaro, Tiburcio Tongo, Vick Torea , Elizabeth Jimenez Montelongo & more
Session will include an author talk, workshop, and dialogue about POOR Magazine's newest book, UnTourBook. This new genre “guide Book” is full of truth about genocide as well as poetry, prayer, stories and art on indigenous resistance to settler colonial erasure, poLice terror, homelessness and the many acts of indigenous/Black/Brown-led resistance from Turtle Island to Palestine and all across Mama Earth. The UnTours across Occupied Turtle Island ( which the book is named after ) was launched in 2016 to reveal the truth about so many acts of settler colonial terror, rape, enslavement removal and murder, Terrifying acts like missionaries and settlers like Juniperro Serra was responsible for under his reign in the California Mission system.
Anakhbayan Collective, City College of San Francisco
Students from City College of San Francisco discuss ways to connect local, campus and international solidarity organizing.
Kevin Van Meter and Robert Ovetz
Café, nonprofit, and public and private sector workers across the United States are on the move—refusing current regimes of work, fighting bosses and organizing unions, speaking about their working lives and demanding workplace democracy. Our workshop will examine two recent workers inquires with café and nonprofit workers in the US. Robert Ovetz will recount his inquiry into the nonprofit industry in his forthcoming Rebels for the System: NGOs, Capitalism and the Labor Movement (Haymarket, 2026). Kevin Van Meter will report on his recently coauthored “Class Composition in the Café Sector” (Notes from Below, 2025) and speak about his forthcoming Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (AK Press). In this workshop participants will have the opportunity to practice a workers’ inquiry to understand the position of their work in the current capitalist economy to develop new tactics and strategies to build our power. The workshop teaches how workers’ inquiry can help circulate workers’ struggles and build working-class power to take on fascism.
Simon Knaphus
Simon Knaphus and Jess Gutfreund
Trans+ joy and reproductive choice are powerful forces of autonomy and freedom from authoritarianism. Join us for a conversation and visioning session about trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive family building and reproductive choice. This panel springs from the recent anthology Seahorses: Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender-Expansive Pregnancy, edited by Simon Knaphus with contributors including Jess Gutfreund. Cis allies and co-conspirators are welcome.
Lara Messersmith-Glavin
Fiction helps shape the way we understand others and ourselves. It tells us about the nature of struggle and combat, of love and family, of our roles and expectations. It informs what we think it means to be a hero or a villain—or a character at all. It can define the boundaries of our imagination or our understanding of power; it can compress or expand our notion of what is possible. With this in mind, I would like to offer a 2 hour creative writing workshop for folks interested in developing short stories or long-form fiction to explore possibilities for creating revolutionary change. We will begin with a brief discussion of the visionary potential of creative writing and look at some concrete examples through readings and familiar texts. Next, we will explore character- versus plot-driven narrative structures and weigh the advantages and limitations of each, as well as consider the different processes or approaches they might entail. Participants will then work in small groups to reflect on issues from their own organizing or political experiences that they want to see explored in fiction. Lastly, participants will spend some time brainstorming or drafting elements of either character or plot that would allow them to address such issues in a story. Folks are welcome to share what they come up with, but no one will be required to read their writing aloud. All levels of experience or literacy are welcome. Participants should expect lively, respectful discussion as well as quiet solo work time. All folks who take part will also be given a small zine of creative writing prompts to take home and will have a chance to share their own with the group.
Paul Messersmith-Glavin and Jasper Bernes
This workshop will explore the ideas of Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito, in the context of other ecological Marxists and the social ecology of Murray Bookchin. We will look at what Saito has found in researching the thinking of Marx during the last 14 years of his life and compare and contrast those ideas to others such as Bookchin who have also thought through the roots of the ecological crisis and ways out. We will explore what we mean when we talk about growth and address both the viability and implications of an anarchist communist degrowth politics. We will also collectively think through what can be done in terms of various forms of revolutionary organizing.
Tehmina Khan, Leslie Simon, Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani, Brianna Smith, Paul Buckley
Poetry for the People began in 1975 and continues to create the beloved community at City College of San Francisco and beyond. This multi-generational panel will celebrate this legacy, will share poems and stories, and will make space for participants to create and share poems in community. With founder Leslie Simon, students of the late Lauren Muller, and current instructor Tehmina Khan, we will discuss the history of this revolutionary movement and our calling to carry it forward into our current struggles.
Eddie Yuen
Presentation of some recently rediscovered posters, photos and handbills of social movements from the 1960s - 1990s. Prior to the “elite capture” of so-called identity politics, many social movements offered a genuine intersection of solidarity-based struggles.
