$34.95 Hardcover
96 pages • 7.5 x 8.5 inches
Color illustrated throughout
Date: 04/09/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-232-1
A Tribute to the Power of Spiritual Practice, Creative Expression, and True Self-Acceptance
I Opened the Gate Laughing is the story of one woman’s journey to creative freedom through gardening and the teachings of Zen. Born in Japan, Mayumi Oda comes back to the practice of Buddhism at beautiful Green Gulch Farm retreat center in Northern California, where she finds a new tranquility and creative spirit through her pen, her brush, and her trowel to overcome the constraints of a traditional upbringing and the sadness of the end of a marriage. This enchanting book is a meditation on the search for inner peace and reawakening. awash with luscious prints and watercolors, beautifully designed, and filled with vivid stories and verse. I Opened the Gate Laughing is a resource for anyone seeking a slower pace, a sacred space, and a garden path.
$16.95 Hardcover
40 pages • 6.9 x 8.1 inches
Color illustrated throughout
Date: 04/09/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-228-4
A Parable of Hope and Peace for All Ages
With beautifully crafted words and exuberant watercolor illustrations, offers a poetic and empowering message for world peace. Recognizing “we are right on the edge of destroying ourselves,” this modern allegory inspires taking joyful steps to end violence. It expands upon the idea that “we are all in the circle together,” and presents a timeless parable for readers of all ages. In the playful style of 12th century Japanese picture scrolls, Mayumi Oda’s art depicts humans as animals who lose their way when their leaders become confused and drawn to violence. The message of this book is the sweet realization that each person can become an agent of goodness and beauty.
Making a Way Out of No Way: Lives of Labor, Love, and Resistance
Foreword by Dr. Rex M. Ellis
$39.95 Hardcover
208 pages • 7.375 x 9.00 inches
96 color illustrations
Date: 06/04/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-240-6
A richly imagined, photo illustrated narrative of 150 years of life in slavery on tobacco plantations in Southern Maryland
For over 165 years, plantation owners in Southern Maryland depended on the labor of enslaved men, women, and children to bring in the tobacco crop. The photographs and stories in this book grew out of the author’s quest to understand how these people, who were subjected to a system that brutalized and dehumanized them, were able not only to survive but to build families and meaningful lives. Author Meredith Taylor has created a credible, well-researched, richly imagined world that is both informative and moving. The work is a poetic interwoven collage of scenes and community of characters that reflect the diversity of experience, “silences,” and incompleteness of the historical record.
$28.00 Hardcover
320 pages • 6.00 x 9.00 inches
36 black and white images
Date: 06/18/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-244-4
A Rare First-Person Account of the Women’s Movement
A comprehensive, indexed memoir about the Second Wave women’s movement by the cofounder of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Muriel Fox offers rare, firsthand stories of 29 women and one man, including Betty Freidan, but also many who have not previously been recognized for their contributions. Unlike books relying on secondary sources, Fox’s memoir is built mainly from her own Feminism Files containing hundreds of letters, clippings, notes, and photographs that she archived.
See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love
By: Jan Cohen-Cruz
$25.95 Paperback
288 pages • 6 x 9 inches
12 black and white images
Date: 09/10/2024
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-247-5
Encounters, transformations, and reflections from in-prison and post-release theater workshops
See Me is a collection of intimate dialogues about collective experiences in the context of prison theater workshops. Each essay is a collaboration between two or three people who connected profoundly in the temporary community that a workshop can create. Part I is an exchange grounded in the prison theater workshop between the author and one of the incarcerated participants. They alternately tell the story of what they found in the workshop, each other, the future they imagined together, and the social turmoil and utopian aspirations of the times. Part II consists of essays jointly written by eight other people impacted by close relationships spawned in diverse in-prison and re-entry theater workshops.
Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician
By: Alice Rothchild
$27.95 Hardcover
336 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Date: 09/24/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-260-4
Free-verse memoir of the radical feminist MD who established the first all-women ob-gyn/midwife practice in Boston
A remarkable autobiography—written entirely in free verse—of Alice Rothchild’s journey from 1950’s good girl to irreverent, feisty, feminist obstetrician-gynecologist forging her own direction in the contradictory, sexist world of medicine. As a child who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, she was compelled to create a path in the often outrageous, male-dominated medical field, repeatedly finding herself to be a first: accepted into an ob-gyn residency, opening an all-woman practice, working with midwives, challenging the status quo, shaped by her early involvement with Our Bodies Ourselves. Rothchild’s poems are steeped in the often-shocking history of medicine and the conflicted sexual politics of the second half of the twentieth century.
Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth
By: Robert Shetterly
$34.95 Hardcover
128 pages • 8.5 x 11.0 inches
50 color images
Date: 10/08/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-256-7
Essays, portraits, and profiles of fifty American peace activists
This third volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly’s striking color portraits and profiles of fifty peace activists as well as essays by Chris Hedges, Kali Rubaii, Paul K. Chappell, Medea Benjamin, Alice Rothchild, and David Swanson. The people honored in this book approach peacemaking in manifold ways. They have told the truth about the lies enabling war, they have protested, they have gone to jail for peace, made art imbued with the suffering of war, the stupidity of war and its cruelty, taught the curricula of peace, exposed the unspeakable wounds and trauma visited on children in war, and shown how environmentally historically, and psychologically wars never end. They have also shown how warmongers promote and profit obscenely from the business of industrial killing, how atrocity is celebrated as heroic. They resist, resist, resist. They act with love.
Creative Instigation: The Art & Strategy of Authentic Community Engagement
By: Fern Tiger
$44.95 Paperback
328 pages • 8 x 10 inches
140 color images
Date: 10/22/2024
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-251-2
These illustrated case stories in effective community engagement in the United States demonstrate how community participation in policymaking underpins democratic institutions. They feature examples of residents involved meaningfully in decision making in local government or educational and nonprofit institutions, as well as communicating with private corporations in ways other than as consumers. Unlike typical engagement, where meetings are announced via limited venues and whoever comes does so with limited information, Creative Instigation describes outreach that is expansive, engagement that is more authentic, and research that delves deeply into qualitative areas to uncover the soul of a community. The diverse stories in this book show tools that are compelling, ways to inform that are graphically clear, methods of dissemination that are broad and profound; and strategies that are insightful.