Contributor Biographies

 

Coordinator & Publisher:

Team Colors Collective | Conor Cash, Craig Hughes & Kevin Van Meter
www.warmachines.info
Team Colors is a collective engaged in 'militant research' to provide 'strategic analysis for the intervention in everyday life'.  Our purpose is to explore questions of everyday resistance, mutual aid, the imposition of work, social reproduction, class composition, community participation and the commons - by creating engaging workshops and the producing provocative written documents and articles.  Currently Team Colors is based Brooklyn, New York, Portland, OR & Tucson, AZ.  Our approach has been developed from our involvement in community organizing projects, community dialogs, and resistance activities in the countries largest suburb of Long Island, New York.  TeamColors@warmachines.info

Conor Cash
Conor Cash is currently a resident of Tucson, Arizona and formerly a resident of Long Island, New York.  He has been involved in organizing efforts on both local and national levels since the tender age of 17.  He is happy to report that although he has maintained his involvement in radical politics, he no longer wears a bandanna, nor does he refer to his friends as comrades.  Conor@warmachines.info

Craig Hughes
Craig Hughes is a graduate student and activist living in New York City. For the past decade he has beenactive in international solidarity, youth and anti-capitalist organizing. He is a member of Team Colors Collective and holds a Master’s degree in History. His current research is focused on suburban social struggles and the functions of international “aid” programs.  Craig@warmachines.info

Kevin Van Meter
Kevin Van Meter is a community organizer and researcher (focusing on everyday resistance) originally from Long Island and a member of the militant research collective Team Colors.  Van Meter appears, along with Benjamin Holtzman and Craig Hughes, in the AK Press collection Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation // Collective Theorization, with an article titled "DIY and the Movement Beyond Capitalism”; an excerpt from his article “The Moment I Cannot Escape: Care, Death, Mourning and the Struggle Against It All” is published in the recent zine collection “The Worst”; additional writings can be found at the Team Colors website.  Kevin@warmachines.info    

 

Publisher:

The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press
www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is a weirdo think tank. Since  2000 we have been working at the intersection of activism, fine art, and media theory. Recent project have included publishing An Atlas of radical Cartography (Lex Bhagat and Lize Mogel editors).  Additionally, we recently held a street party in between the local supermarket and a well regarded taco truck. Based in Los Angeles, current collective members include Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst, and Christina Ulke. We have worked or continued to work with many skilled and wonderful people, including our print designers Jessica Fleischmann and Kimberly Varella.

 

Journal Contributors:

Jen Angel           
Jen is a long-time media activist now living in Berkeley, California.

Jen Angel has been a writer and media activist for over 15 years. She is the co-founder and publisher of Clamor Magazine, [www.clamormagazine.org] an award-winning quarterly magazine covering radical culture and politics which ceased publication in 2006. She is author of a recent pamphlet called, “Becoming the Media: A Critical History of Clamor Magazine” [www.akpress.org/2008/items/becomingthemedia] printed in March 2008 by PM Press. [www.pmpress.org]

In 2002, she was named as one of “30 under 30 Visionaries who are changing the world” by Utne Reader. She is a founding board member of Allied Media Projects, a non-profit independent media advocacy organization.

Jen’s publishing history includes Clamor (1999-2006), publishing The Zine Yearbook (1996-2004), writing her personal zine Fucktooth (1991-2000), and editing MaximumRockNRoll (1997-1998). Her writing has also appears in magazines such as Punk Planet, Bitch, and In These Times, and she is a contributing editor to Yes! Magazine. Jen also works as a producer for at KPFA Radio in Berkeley.

Currently, her main project is to help independent authors, filmmakers, and artists promote their work through Aid & Abet [www.aidandabet.org], a cooperative booking and publicity group. She blogs at jenangel.wordpress.com. [http://jenangel.wordpress.com]

Jen would like to thank Lisa Jervis, Ramsey Kanaan, Jess Bell, Debbie Rasmussen, Marina Sitrin, and Kevin Van Meter for their feedback on this piece. 

Bay Area Radical Health Collective | Liz Highleman
www.barhc.w2c.net

Bluestockings Books, Café and Activist Center | Malav Kanuga
www.bluestockings.com
Malav Kanuga is a member of the Bluestockings worker’s collective as well as a PhD student and teacher in the CUNY system.  He can be reached at malav@bluestockings.com

George Caffentzis
www.midnightnotes.org
George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He has edited with the Collective two books published by Autonomedia: "Midnight Oil: Work, Energy War, 1973-1992" and "Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War."

Chris Carlsson
www.chriscarlsson.com
Chris Carlsson, executive director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, and community organizer. For the last twenty-five years his activities have focused on the underlying themes of horizontal communications, organic communities and public space. He was one of the founders, editors and frequent contributors to the ground-breaking San Francisco magazine Processed World. He also helped launch the monthly bike-ins known as Critical Mass that have spread to five continents and over 300 cities. He has edited four books, “Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology” (Verso: 1990), “Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture” (City Lights: 1998, co-edited with James Brook and Nancy J. Peters), “Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration” (AK Press: 2002), “The Political Edge” (City Lights Foundation: 2004). He published his first novel, “After The Deluge,” in 2004, a story of post-economic San Francisco in the year 2157 (Full Enjoyment Books: 2004). Carlsson makes his living as a book designer, editor, and typesetter. He is a member of Media Workers Union Local 100 in San Francisco. He is also recent past board president of CounterPULSE, a San Francisco-based arts organization, where he has been producing a series of public Talks since January 2006. Check his website for updates on this and links to his blog and other activities: www.chriscarlsson.com, or email him directly at cc at chriscarlsson dot com.

Maribel Casas-Cortes & Sebastian Cobarrubias | Producciones Translocales
www.countercartographies.org
Producciones Translocales: A trans-Atlantic collaboration/couple/family between Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias (+Gabriel) has been involved in political work with a variety of collectives such as the Chicago Direct Action Network, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Mexico Solidarity Network, la Agencia de Asuntos Precarios.  They are currently PhD candidates in Anthropology and Geography respectively at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where they participated in the Social Movements Working Group, and co-founded the Counter Cartographies Collective. (3Cs). 3Cs serves as an interface challenging the division of intellectual and activist work by engaging in radical mapping projects on transformations in the university.  They are busy imagining what it might mean to use ‘D.A.D.’s, (Direct Action Diapers) to expand our notion of militant actions and bio-weapons. 

PT have written about the 3Cs experience in the edited volume on militant research Constituent Imagination and in Brumaria.  Other work has appeared in the Atlas of Radical Cartography and Activist Research Newsletter. They also collaborate with in translation work with Transform and the online collective Notas Rojas, as well as popular education workshops at Universidad Rural Paulo Freire. Based currently in Madrid, their research and militancy currently focuses on “precarity”, migration and the construction of the European Union, this work includes projects with and focusing on social movements’ analyses, especially those developed by activist research collectives and radical cartographers.

Emmanuella Cosse
Emmanuelle Cosse is a journalist and activist, member of Act Up-Paris since 1992 and involved in sans-papiers struggles in France. She participates with the Precarity-Map, a European project to create a cartography of precarity movements [www.precarity-map.net].

CrimethInc.
www.crimethinc.com
The CrimethInc. ex-Workers' Collective is an informal, anonymous network dedicated to the liberation of human potential from the constraints of capitalism and all other forms of hierarchy.  CrimethInc. nodes publish books and literature, disseminate information pertaining to direct action and social struggle, organize events intended to foster a culture of resistance, and occasionally produce analyses such as the one included here.

Direct Action to Stop the War  
www.actagainstwar.net

Harmony Goldberg | Right to the City Alliance & the National Domestic Worker's Alliance
www.righttothecity.org | www.domesticworkersunited.org
Harmony Goldberg - a founding director of the movement-based political education center, SOUL / the School Of Unity and Liberation - has been a long-time supporter of radical and left community-based organizations. She is currently a Resource Ally of the Right to the City Alliance and a supporter of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.  Harmony is also a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and she provides political education support for grassroots organizations around the country.

Family Farm Defenders | John Peck
www.familyfarmdefenders.org
John E. Peck grew up on a 260 acre farm in central Minnesota , has a B.A. in Economics from Reed College and a PhD in Land Resources from UW-Madison.  He attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro as a student activist and has also participated in protests against the WTO in Seattle, the World Bank/IMF in Washington DC, as well as against the FTAA in Quebec and Miami.  For the past six years he has been the executive director of Family Farm Defenders, a national grassroots organization with members overseas and in all fifty states. 

Silvia Federici
Silvia Federici is a scholar and an activist. She has taught Philosophy and Women's Studies at several American universities and at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria). From 1987 to 2005 she has taught Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University (in Hempstead, New York).  She is now Emeritus Professor at Hofstra University.

She has been active in the feminist movement, the movement against the death penalty and the anti-globalization movement.  In 1972 she was a co-founder of the International Feminist Collective; From 1973 to 1977 she was active in the international campaign for Wages for Housework and a founder of the New York Wages For Housework Committee. Since 1990 she has been a member and co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization which documents the impact of globalization and structural adjustment policies  on the African educational systems, and
In particular on the condition of African students and academics.  Between 1995 and 2002 she was a co-founder and member of the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project.  She has written many essays on culture, education, feminist theory, the international feminist movement, and the impact of globalization on the social position of women and education internationally.  Her published works in English include: Caliban and the  Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. (New York: Autonomedia, 2004) [Author]; African Visions. Literary Images, Political Change and Social Struggle in Contemporary Africa. (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000) [Co-editor]; A Thousand Flowers. Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities. Trenton (NJ): Africa World Press, Inc., 2000. [Co-editor]; Enduring Western Civilization. The Construction of the Concept of the West and Its 'Others.' Westport (CT): Praeger, 1995 [Editor].

Michael Hardt & El Kilombo Intergaláctico in Conversation 
www.elkilombo.org
Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author
with Antonio Negri of Empire and Multitude

Brian Holmes 
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com
Brian Holmes is an art critic, activist and translator, living in Paris, working at the intersections of artistic practice and political economy. He has a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, and is the author of the book Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays In Reverse Imagineering (New York: Autonomedia, 2008) and Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and Politics for a Networked Era (Zagreb: WHW, 2002). He was a member of the graphic arts group Ne pas plier from 1999 to 2001, and has recently worked with the French conceptual art group Bureau d’Etudes. He lectures widely in Europe and North and South America, is a frequent contributor to the international mailinglist Nettime, a member of the editorial committee of the art magazines Springerin (Austria) and Brumaria (Spain), and of the interdisciplinary journal Multitudes (France). He is now preparing a book entitled Continental Drift: The Other Side of Neoliberalism.
 

The Icarus Project | Alex Samets
www.theicarusproject.net
Alex Samets is a writer, dancer, and community organizer living, working and studying in New York. Alex has been working with The Icarus Project in various capacities since 2003.

Starbucks Workers Union (Industrial Workers of the World)
www.starbucksunion.org

“I Want To Do This All Day: Redefining Learning & Reinventing Education” 
Audio Documentary
www.dothisallday.org
In the spring of 2006 we set out to investigate the living history of the "radical learning" movement, and compiled our findings in this 2hr 30min audio piece. The documentary uses interviews from 23 different learning spaces to illuminate the grassroots movement of people and communities taking power over their own education and creating learning environments based on freedom, cooperation and social change.

El Kilombo Intergaláctico
www.elkilombo.org

Latino Health Outreach Project | Jennifer Whitney
www.cghc.org/lhop.html

Peter Linebaugh 
Peter Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo. He is the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century and coauthor (with Marcus Rediker) of Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.  His most recent book is titled The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All.

Brian Marks
Brian Marks is a geographer from Louisiana, he can be contacted at:bmarks1@email.arizona.edu.

Daniel McGowan 
www.supportdaniel.org 
Daniel McGowan is an environmental and social justice activist. He was charged in federal court on many counts of arson, property destruction and conspiracy, all relating to two incidents in Oregon in 2001. Until recently, Daniel was offered two choices by the government: cooperate by informing on other people, or go to trial and face life in prison. His only real option was to plead not guilty until he could reach a resolution of the case that permitted him to honor his principles. As a result of months of litigation and negotiation, Daniel was able to admit to his role in these two incidents, while not implicating or identifying any other people who might have been involved. He was sentenced to 7 years in prison on June 4, 2007 and began serving his time on July 2, 2007.

As of10:00pm Wednesday June 11th, 2008 Political Prisoner Daniel McGowan is being housed at the Columbia County Jail in Portage, Wisconsin. For that past month Daniel has been in transit from one holding facility to another, thrown into the Segregated Housing Unit ("The Hole"), and is currently in need of your letters and support; we will update this information as we receive announcements from the Friends and Family of Daniel McGowan. 

Team Colors asks readers and supporters of Whirlwinds to take a moment to a write letter (or even a short postcard) to Daniel, Jeffrey “Free” Luers or another political prisoner.  Letter writing guidelines are available, as well as a full list of political prisoners in the United States (from the Prison Activist Resource Center). 
DANIEL McGOWAN
#63794-053
Columbia County Jail
403 Jackson Street
Portage, Wisconsin 53901

Philly’s Pissed & Philly Stands Up | Timothy Coleman, Esteban Kelly & Em Squires
www.phillyspissed.net

Philly’s Pissed
Philly's Pissed is a grassroots group working in Philadelphia. We provide direct support to survivors of sexual assault, as well as education and advocacy promoting the idea of survivor autonomy and perpetrator accountability.  Philly's Pissed formed in 2004 to address the issue of sexual assault within our communities. We encourage you to visit our website at www.phillyspissed.net or write to us at support@phillyspissed.net.

Philly Stands Up
Philly Stands Up is small collective of individuals working in Philadelphia to confront sexual assault in our various communities. We believe in restoring trust and justice within our community by working with both survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault.
We focus on working with people who have assaulted others to hold them accountable to the survivor(s) and restore their relationships within their communities. In dealing with perpetrators, we seek to recognize and change behavior, rather than ostracizing and allowing future assaults elsewhere. We support their healing process, and challenge them on their behavior in order to prevent future assaults.

We also work to educate ourselves and others on issues that contribute to sexualized violence. To encourage awareness building, we provide support for other groups and collectives as well as host workshops in Philly and elsewhere.

We are a group that survivors can come to for help and support. We will always support survivors and are committed to survivor autonomy.

If you want to contact us about our work or about a situation, please email phillystandsup.safe@gmail.com.

Timothy Colman
Timothy Colman lives in Philadelphia, where he spends his time working with youth, dreaming about history and cementing his reputation as a local astrologer. He is also a member of Philly's Pissed.

Esteban Kelly
Esteban is a Jamaican-American radical geographer and community organizer who makes his home in the City of Brotherly Love. Some of homeboy's recent projects involve creating a support network among anti-authoritarian queer people of color, and working with the Philly "Dudes" Collective on building analysis toward dismantling male supremacy and cultivating positive masculinity among men. Esteban remains active in West Philadelphia anti-gentrification campaigns while studying as a PhD student in Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. A member of Philly Stands Up for over 3 years, homeboy has focused on 'restorative justice' in sexual assault situations, working with survivors as well as perpetrators offering support, communication, and accountability mechanisms in his community.

Emily Squires
Ems is a printmaker, bread baker, imminent gardener and extrovert who loves Philadelphia. She spends her days working with artists and young people and is passionate about the role of creativity, honesty, and justice in education.  

Stevie Peace | Critical Resistance (interviewed) & Restorative Justice Community Action
www.criticalresistance.org
Stevie Peace is a writer and organizer from Shoreview, Minnesota. He was first interviewed by Team Colors through his work at the Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans, and is pleased to be contributing once again for In The Middle of a Whirlwind. Stevie continues his support for Black Liberation in the wake of Gulf Coast recovery through the Anti-Racist Working Group National Solidarity Network. He currently works for Restorative Justice Community Action in Minneapolis. Stevie's writings have been published in AZiNe and Borderlands: Tales from Disputed Territories Between Races and Cultures. This fall he will be co-facilitating a class on Asian-American feminist/queer organizing and community-building, as well as beginning a compilation narrative project of Asian America's political recomposition and its potential sites of radical struggle. Stevie's analyses and thought processes have spiraled, boomeranged, flowered and vacillated considerably over the years, but through it all he's affirmed at least a few things: dignity, honesty, love, and refusing to half-ass. He lives in St. Paul.

Roadblock Earth First! 
www.i69news.bee-town.com

Gigi Roggero | Edu-Factory Collective
www.edu-factory.org

Maggie Schmitt | Precarias a la Deriva
www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm

Ben Shepard
Benjamin Shepard, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Human Services at City Tech/ City University of New York (CUNY).  He is the author/editor of five books, White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997) and From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (Verso, 2002). The latter work was a non-fiction finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2002. In addition, Queer Political Performance and Protest and Play, Creativity, and the New Community Organizing are both under contract with Routledge.  His work, Community Projects as Social Activism: From Direct Action to Direct Services (Sage) is due out next year.

Shepard’s writing has appeared in anthologies including The Encyclopedia of Social Movements (Sharpe, 2004), That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull Press, 2004), Democracy’s Moment: Renewing Democracy for the 21st Century (Roman and Littlefield, 2002), and Teamsters and Turtles: Leftist Movements Today and Tomorrow (Roman and Littlefield, 2002). His articles have appeared in journals including Working USA, Radical Society, Lambda Book Review, Monthly Review, Sexualities, Journal of Progressive Human Services, Antioch Review, and Drain. He got his start writing for the Bay Area Reporter in the early 1990s.

Shepard has done organizing work with ACT UP, SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets/New York, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd Response Team, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, the More Gardens Coalition, and the Times Up! Bike Lane Liberation Front and Garden Working Group."

Basav Sen
Basav Sen is a community activist and writer in Washington DC. He is active in struggles for a just global economy, for immigrants' right and for housing justice.

“Smalltown, U.S.A.” Worker Center
LIBERAL MAYORS & LIBERAL FUNDERS: A CASE OF  RACISM, CLASSISM, AND IDEOLOGICAL WARFARE  was written collectively by members of the Board of Directors of the Smalltown, U.S.A. Worker Center (SWC). The SWC is an organization consisting of Latin@ workers and white and Latin@ organizers that focuses on issues involving day laborers and is affiliated with a day laborers' union, Day Laborers United (DLU).  The day laborers on the board are primarily from Mexico and El Salvador, and many were active in grassroots issues in their countries of origin, and a few are members of revolutionary groups in their countries of origin, such as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN ) in El Salvador and Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). The white and Latin@ organizers range from anti capitalist and anti-racist to liberal, and have a broad range of organizing experience, including local community organizing and coalition-building on issues stemming from racism, poverty to anti-war organizing.

smartMeme
www.smartmeme.org
Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning are organizers and strategists with the smartMeme Strategy and Training Project, a practioner’s network that explores story-based strategies for movement building and fundamental social change. More tools and conversations on changing the story are at: www.smartmeme.org.

$pread Magazine | Darby Hicker
www.spreadmagazine.org
$pread is a quarterly print magazine by and for sex workers (escorts, strippers, fetish workers, porn actors, prostitutes, phone sex operators, etc). Founded in 2005 and published by a group of all-volunteer current and former sex workers and allies based out of New York City, $pread aims to provide a space for sex workers of all genders to speak for themselves, regardless of their perspectives. We strive to build community among sex workers and to educate the general non-sex working public about the diverse realities of the sex industry. No Justice, No Piece is a regular activism column, written by Darby Hickey, a DC-based sex worker activist. Find out more about $pread at their website above. 

Brian Tokar
www.social-ecology.org
Brian Tokar is a long-time activist and author, and the current Director of the Institute for Social Ecology, based in Plainfield, Vermont.  He is the author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale, edited two books on the politics of biotechnology, Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders,  and lectures widely on a variety of environmental and political topics. 

Daniel Tucker | AREA Chicago
www.areachicago.org 
Daniel Tucker has worked as a cultural and political organizer in Chicago for the last seven years, initiating a number of large-scale local projects and events. The themes he has focused on are primarily public space, leftist history and geography. He is currently serving as the editor of AREA Chicago print/online publication dedicated to researching and networking local social and cultural movements in Chicago. His writings have appeared in Clamor, Proximity (Chicago), BootPrint (St. Louis), the Journal of Northeast Issues (Hamburg) and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. He has lectured widely about the intersections of art and politics. miscprojects.com <http://miscprojects.com>

US Federation of Workers Cooperatives | Melissa Hoover
www.usworkercoop.org 

Ultra-red
www.ultrared.org
Ultra-red pursue a fragile and dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. From their practice of militant sound investigation, the audio collective map contested spaces and histories as an articulation of social relations.

Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, Ultra-red utilize sound-based research to directly engage political struggle. With ten associates working in North America and Europe, Ultra-red pursue a fragile and dynamic exchange between art and political organizing producing radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, and installations. Founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists, Ultra-red have expanded to include artists, researchers and organizers from different social movements including the struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS. The group also run the fair-use online record label, Public Record (www.publicrec.org).
 

United States Social Forum Documentation Committee | Marina Karides
www.ussf2007.org
Marina Karides is Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. She serves as Sociologists Without Borders representative to the USSF National Planning Committee and is coordinator for WSF participation of several US academic associations. Along with articles and chapters on the social forum process, she has written with eleven scholar-activists the volume, Global Democracy and the World Social Forums, and edited with Judith Blau, The World and US Social Forums: A Better World is Possible and Necessary. As part of the US Documentation Committee she editing the volume, The USSF: Perspectives of Movement.
 

Interviews:

Ashanti Omowali Alston | Interviewed by Team Colors
Revolutionary, speaker, writer, organizer, motivator. Ashanti is one of the few former members of the Black Panther Party who self-describes as an anarchist within the Black Liberation Movement. He is also a former Black Liberation Army (BLA) political prisoner. He is currently co-chair of the National Jericho Movement to free U.S. political prisoners (http://www.thejerichomovement.com) and a member of pro-Zapatista people-of-color U.S.-based Estación Libre and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement-New York City. On top of all that, he is an Elder-in-training and a grandfather of a small “nation.”

Robin D.G. Kelley | Interviewed by Benjamin Holtzman
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the prize-winning books Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn (Beacon 2001); and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). He also edited (with Earl Lewis), To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2000), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a History Book Club Selection. To Make Our World Anew was an outgrowth of an earlier collaboration with Lewis, the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 1995-1998), of which he authored volume 10, titled Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (1996). Kelley also co-edited (with Sidney J. Lemelle) Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (Verso, 1994). He is currently completing a biography of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk, titled Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press), Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa (Harvard University Press, forthcoming), and a general survey of African American history co-authored with Tera Hunter and Earl Lewis to be published by Norton. Kelley’s essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including The Nation, Monthly Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, New York Times (Arts and Leisure), New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Color Lines, Code Magazine, Utne Reader, Lenox Avenue, African Studies Review, Black Music Research Journal, Callaloo, New Politics, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, One World, Social Text, Metropolis, American Visions, Boston Review, Fashion Theory, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, Souls, Metropolis, and frieze: contemporary art and culture, to name a few.

Ben Holtzman is an editor and activist living in New York. His writings have been published in Clamor Magazine, Left History, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Maximumrocknroll, Popular Music and Society, Radical Society and the collection, Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization (AK Press). He can be reached at benholtzman at yahoo dot com

Interviews with Anti-RNC/DNC Organizers:

Unconventional Action (National | Interviewed by Team Colors
www.unconventionalaction.org

Recreate ’68 (Denver) | Interviewed by Team Colors
www.recreate68.org

RNC Welcoming Committee (Twin Cities) | Interviewed by Team Colors
www.rncwelcomingcommittee.org

Artwork:

Dario Azzellini & Lize Mogel:
Dario Azzellini, 1967, MA in political sciences, social investigator, author and artist. He collaborates with research institutes and foundations in Germany, Italy, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexiko. Actually studying a PhD about “Participatory and Protagonistic Democracy in Venezuela”. He published several books, numerous essays and various documentaries about Colombia, Italy, Nicaragua, Mexiko, Venezuela, Migration and Racism, War, and Postfordism. His work has been translated to different languages. More information: www.azzellini.net

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography. She inserts and distributes cartographic projects into public space and via publications. She is co-editor with Lex Bhagat of the book/map collection "An Atlas of Radical Cartography" and co-curator of the exhibition "An Atlas", which is touring nationally. She has also worked with groups including the Center for Land Use Interpretation and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. www.an-atlas.com  /
www.publicgreen.com

Kristine Virsis | Justseeds Artists Cooperative
www.justseeds.org

Brett Bloom | Temporary Services
www.temporaryservices.org
Brett Bloom is one of three who work together as Temporary Services (www.temporaryservice.org). The group is launching a new imprint, Half Letter Press, later this summer with the release of a brand new book "Public Phenomena." The 152-page, full-color book gathers together 10 years of our documentation in over 12 cities of how people creatively and informally modify city and rural spaces every day against intended design and inherited planning. TS is also beginning work on a large scale public project with prisoners in New York to be launched sometime next year.
 
In other work, Bloom is conducting research for a forthcoming double-book on creative resistance to global housing crises and articulating how neoliberal market expansion is exacerbating traditional housing inequalities. The book will be called UNHOUSED. Bloom slowly maintains a blog where all his research for the book is made public:
unhoused.livejournal.com.
 
You can also find Bloom at www.letsremake.info.

USSMEC
USSMEAC is an Advisory Commission made up of representatives selected from the United States Sadomasochistic Community.  It is important that the gifted fetishists, the psychodramatists, the pain sluts and the sissyboys of our proud nation advise our Military Intelligence Industry on ethical power exchange.  The AltSex Community wants our Homeland to be conscientious while hedonistically attaining our democratic goals.