All Titles
(In order of publication)
Living Toward Justice: A Time Capsule
Edited by Sonya E. Pritzker
An illustrated exploration of how practitioners and scholars in the field of embodied social justice (ESJ) seek to incorporate justice in everyday life.
ArtMill: A Story of Sustainable Creativity in Bohemia
Barbara Benish tells her story as a female artist who found a way to build a life in a rural, post-totalitarian, foreign country, it is a testament to the resilience of the people of that small nation that was sacrificed in the tumultuous chess game of colonial superpowers dividing up Europe after the devastation of WWII.
More Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations
A collection of letters exchanged between the author and four “outriders”—artists, writers, and activists who risk everything to confront censorship, injustice, and the constraints of convention.
DisElderly Conduct: The Flawed Business of Assisted Living and Hospice
A personal account of unmet needs in assisted living and hospice, Judy Karofsky aims to spark discussions about new approaches for America’s aging population and family decision makers.
Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations
By: Margaret Randall
By excerpting from letters she exchanged with five irreverent writers and artists, Margaret Randall constructs conversations that open windows on four pivotal moments in her life and on world events.
Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician
By: Alice Rothchild
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.
Creative Instigation: The Art & Strategy of Authentic Community Engagement
By: Fern Tiger
Creative Instigation is a collection of in-depth case stories focused on effective and innovative community engagement and policymaking in diverse cities across the western U.S.
Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth
By: Robert Shetterly
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.
See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love
Encounters, transformations, and reflections from in-prison and post-release theater workshops, each essay is a collaboration between two or three people who connected profoundly in the temporary community that a workshop can create.
The Women’s Revolution: How We Changed Your Life
By Muriel Fox
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 built mainly from her own hundreds of letters, clippings, notes, and photographs that she archived in her “Feminism Files.”
Making a Way Out of No Way: Lives of Labor, Love, and Resistance
By Merideth M. Taylor, Foreword by Dr. Rex M. Ellis
A richly imagined, photo illustrated narrative of 150 years of life in slavery on tobacco plantations in Southern Maryland. 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.
Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty— 30th Anniversary Edition
By Anne Herbert, Paloma Pavel, Mayumi Oda
Foreword by Desmond Mpilo Tutu
A parable of hope and peace for all ages with beautifully crafted words and exuberant watercolor illustrations, Random Kindness 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.
I Opened the Gate Laughing: An Inner Journey — 20th Anniversary Edition
By Mayumi Oda
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. I Opened the Gate Laughing is a resource for anyone seeking a slower pace, a sacred space, and a garden path.
Judith Letting Go: Six Months in the World’s Smallest Death Cafe
By Mark Dowie
The story of an old man learns how to die from a younger woman facing death, this book is ultimately about the lost human art of releasing everything that matters to the living in preparation for the inevitable. It is a rare lesson offered by a poet who somehow taught herself, and then the author, how to let go.
Luck
Illustrations by Barbara Byers
Luck is a collection of essays that combines scholarly research with personal experience, producing texts both intimate and illuminating. Always attentive to the world around her and the one within, Randall has brought us her most relevant and powerful essays to date.
That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions
Edited by Leigh Sugar
Poetry and prose by artists, writers, and activists who’ve taught workshops in U.S. criminal legal institutions, this is a book for anyone seeking to understand the prison industrial complex from a human perspective.
All author royalties from this book will be donated to Dances for Solidarity, a project that brings arts opportunities to people incarcerated in solitary confinement.
Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House
The roles that Christodora House has played from 19th-century settlement house up to its newest form. Settlement house workers have helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars.
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir is a short, abundantly illustrated autobiography of the American art writer, activist, and curator Lucy R. Lippard. Describing tchotchkes, photographs, and art in her unpretentious New Mexico home, the author informally narrates key events and relationships in her 86-year-long, highly creative life.
Zoned Out! Race Displacement, and City Planning in New York City, (Revised Edition)
Edited by Tom Angotti and Sylvia Morse
Zoned Out! shows how gentrification and displacement of low-income communities of color have occurred in Williamsburg, Harlem and Chinatown, neighborhoods facing massive displacement of people of color, and looks at ways the city can address inequalities, promote authentic community-based planning and develop housing in the public domain.
Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater,
Vol 1 & Vol 2 (set)
Edited by Ben Fink
This two-volume anthology tells the story of Roadside Theater’s first 45 years and includes nine award-winning original play scripts; ten essays by authors from different disciplines and generations, which explore the plays’ social, economic, and political circumstances; and a critical recounting of the theater’s history from 1975 through 2020.
Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater, Volume 2: The Intercultural Plays, 1990–2020
Edited by Ben Fink
The plays in Volume 2 come from Roadside’s intercultural and issue-specific theater work, including long-term collaborations with the African American Junebug Productions in New Orleans and the Puerto Rican Pregones Theater in the South Bronx, as well as with residents on both sides of the walls of recently-built prisons.
Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater, Volume 1: The Appalachian History Plays, 1975–1989
Edited by Ben Fink
The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam. Roadside has spent 45 years searching for what art in a democracy might look like.
A Peaceful Superpower: Lessons from the World’s Largest Antiwar Movement
A definitive analysis of the impacts of the Iraq antiwar movement told by distinguished peace scholar and activist David Cortright.
In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?
Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her—what she calls a camp of angels. She sees each as a brave messenger of love and freedom for a society that badly needs “uncolonized minds.”
Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth
This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series, is a collection of environmental and climate activists whose stunning color portraits Robert Shetterly painted with the intention of honoring their work and bringing them to a wider audience.
The Book of Judith: Opening Hearts Through Poetry
Edited by Spoon Jackson, Mark Foss, and Sara Press
The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum and echoes her own determination to perceive contradiction without judgment. For the next generation of teaching artists in Corrections and elsewhere, the book serves as an inspiration on the qualities needed to survive and thrive in a multi-faceted, ever-changing environment.
More on The Book of Judith here.
Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind
They lived the dream of Manifest Destiny; their consciousness changing only gradually over the generations. Dunlap looks back into California’s and America’s history for the key to their silences and a way to heal the wounds of the land, its original people, and the harmful mind of the colonizer.
We Built a Village: Cohousing and the Commons
By Diane Rothbard Margolis, Foreword by David Bollier
We Built a Village is both a memoir and a sociological analysis that describes the process of planning and building an early cohousing community in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid 1990s, setting in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together.
Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea
By Aviva Rahmani, Foreword by Lucy Lippard
Divining Chaos provides a personal memoir of eco-artist Aviva Rahmani, offering her Trigger-Point theory thesis and unparalleled exclusivity to the moments in her life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Rahmani shares intimate decisions that shaped her life’s work.
Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965–2020, by Those Who Lived It
By Jan Cohen-Cruz and Rad Pereira, Forewords by Carlton Turner and Jill Dolan
Meeting the Moment explores experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in the U.S. The work offers insight into the challenges and adaptations of the industry, recognizing limitations due to discrimination and unequal opportunity that performance artists have faced over the past 55 years.
Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers (Revised edition)
First published in 1984, Risking a Somersault in the Air is a collection of interviews with fourteen of Nicaragua’s most important writers-revolutionaries. Filling in the gaps with new photographs and updates on the writers in the time since the original edition, the book looks at the sacrifices, conflicts, and solutions of the creative artists of Nicaragua’s revolution. Randall shows how Nicaragua, like its poetry, is an expression of great love, imagination, and liberation.
Artists in My Life
By Margaret Randall, Forewords by Mary Gabriel and Ed McCaughan
Artists in My Life is a collection of intimate and conversational accounts of the visual artists that have impacted the renowned poet-activist Margaret Randall on her own journey as an artist. Each story offers insight into the artist’s life and work, and analyses the impact it had on Randall’s own work and its impact on the larger art community. The work strives to answer bigger questions about visual art as a whole and its lasting political influence on the world stage.
Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Edited by Edvige Giuntaand Mary Anne Trasciatti
Talking to the Girls is a written memorial to the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, bringing together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers to speak on this singular, tragic event that had a remarkable impact.
Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities
Edited by Amara Geffen, Ann Rosenthal, Chris Fermantle, and Aviva Rahmani
Compiled of 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, EcoArt in Action stands as a field guide for practical solutions to critical environmental challenges. Each contribution provides models for ecoart practice that are adaptable for use within a variety of classrooms, communities, and contexts.
Click here to see our Ecoart in Action contributors!
Cultivating Creativity
The product of over three decades of teaching design studios and creativity seminars primarily at the University of Washington, Cultivating Creativity offers firsthand, on-the-ground accounts of encouraging creative expression in the classroom. In this lively book, course instructors will find a wealth of creativity-awakening exercises and strategies that can be adapted to suit a variety of disciplines.
Healing from Genocide in Rwanda: Rugerero Survivors Village, an Artist Book
By Susan Viguers and Lily Yeh
Healing from Genocide in Rwanda demonstrates the power of art in the service of healing and is a testimony to responsive community process in a highly sensitive environment. The work immerses readers in the stories of two Rwandans who as small children experienced the 1994 Genocide. It tells of the horrific tragedy each survived, the courage necessary for surviving, and the humanity they embody.
How Spaces Become Places: Place Makers Tell Their Stories
How Spaces Become Places feature stories of community members acting together to transform edgy, empty, contested, or unsafe spaces into functional, safe, convivial places. Pragmatic, real life accounts offer edifying and instructive examples of the kinds of work a variety of readers can do within their own communities.
Portraits of Racial Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth
The first volume of Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series, Portraits of Racial Justice takes a multimedia, interdisciplinary approach, blending art and history with today’s issues concerning social, environmental, and economic fairness. Shetterly’s paintings, as well as profiles of those portrayed, illuminate a community of people not only willing to recognize the shortcomings of America’s history, but most importantly, individuals who offer their visions of a better world moving forward.
In the Struggle: Scholars and the Fight Against Industrial Agribusiness in California
By Daniel J. O’Connell and Scott J. Peters
In the Struggle tells the stories of eight notable public scholars of California’s San Joaquin Valley, and describes their persistent engagement spanning generations of sustained endeavor, a dogged war in which workers and scholars together repeatedly took on the powerful agricultural industry, the political machines, and even the universities.
Jane Jacobs’s First City: Learning from Scranton, Pennsylvania
By Glenna Lang
A brilliant work of scholarship that convincingly shows how Jane Jacobs’s canonical work on urbanism and the life of great cities, her work on city and national economies, and her underlying social and ethical foundations developed in the historic, mid-sized city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
My Life in 100 Objects
My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit.
Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD
How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This intriguing question took social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries. From these visits Fullilove has discerned the larger architecture of Main Streets: the ways that Main Streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes, how they are a marker for the integrity of civilization—and the marks aren’t always good.
Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe
By Ann Snitow,
Foreword by Susan Faludi
Visitors tells the story of the well-known professor and feminist activist Ann Snitow’s adventures as an organizer in East Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With wit and empathy, Snitow captures change as it unfolds and presents extraordinary insight into the origins and development of an internationalist feminism that is still evolving today.
A Man of the Theater: Survival as an Artist in Iran
A Man of the Theater tells the personal story of a theater artist caught between the two great upheavals of Iranian history in the 20th century.
Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War
By Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty, editors
Waging Peace in Vietnam shows how the GI movement unfolded, presenting first-hand accounts, oral histories, and underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs documenting the actions of GIs and veterans who took part in the resistance.
Such a Pretty Girl: A Story of Struggle, Empowerment, and Disability Pride
A disability rights activist tells the story of her liberation from oppressive standards of normalcy, showing that freedom comes not through cure, but through organizing to end exclusion from public and social life.
In the Company of Rebels: A Generational Memoir of Bohemians, Deep Heads, and History Makers
A personal portrait of 46 activists, artists, radicals, and thinkers who raised issues of justice, the environment, feminism, and colonialism
Placemaking with Children and Youth: Participatory Practices for Planning Sustainable Communities
By Victoria Derr, Louise Chawla, and Mara Mintzer
An illustrated, essential guide to engaging children and teens in the process of urban design.
Works of Heart: Building Village Through the Arts
Revised Edition
By Lynne Elizabeth and Suzanne Young
Citizen artists revitalize places, celebrate culture, and inspire social change in this beautiful introduction to community-engaged arts.
Conversations with Diego Rivera: The Monster in His Labyrinth
By Alfredo Cardona Peña
Translated by Alvaro Cardona-Hine
A year of weekly interviews (1949–1950) with artist Diego Rivera by poet Alfredo Cardona-Peña disclose Rivera’s iconoclastic views of life and the art world of that time.
Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power
By Ernest Thompson and Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Introduction by Coleman A. Young
Foreword by Dominic T. Moulden
Afterword by Molly Rose Kaufman
The story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a better place.
The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race
Carl Anthony interweaves urban history, racial justice, and cosmology with personal experiences as an architect/planner, environmentalist, and Black American. By connecting the struggles for social and racial justice to the universe, it creates a new story for our time.
Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts, 2nd Edition
By Mat Schwarzman
Illustrated by Keith Knight
Ten transformative local arts projects come alive in this illustrated training manual for youth leaders and teachers. This energetic guidebook demonstrates the enormous power of art in grassroots social change.
Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD
Foreword by Carlos F. Peterson and Mary Travis Bassett
Root Shock examines three different US cities to unmask the crippling results of decades-old disinvestment in communities of color and the urban renewal practices that ultimately destroyed these neighborhoods for the advantage of developers and the elite.
Openings: A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970–1992
By Sabra Moore
Forewords by Lucy R. Lippard and Margaret Randall
An account of the women’s art movement in New York City from 1970 to 1992 and how these women created politically and personally effective art works, exhibitions, actions, and institutions.
Growing A Life: Teen Gardeners Harvest Food, Health, and Joy
By Illéne Pevec, PhD
A testament to the influential nature of educational and community gardening programs for teens.
Building Together: Case Studies in Participatory Planning and Community Building
By Roger Katan with Ronald Shiffman
Case studies of neighborhood developments from North and South America, Europe, and Africa that span more than forty years. This book offers a seminal treatise on the community based design practices of participatory planning an advocacy architecture.
From Foreclosure to Fair Lending: Advocacy, Organizing, Occupy, and the Pursuit of Equitable Credit
Edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires
This book informs a renewed movement for fair lending and fair housing. Leading advocates and specialists examine strategic initiatives to realize objectives of the federal Fair Housing Act as well as state and local laws.
Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD
An identification of the problems of socially, economically, and racially divided neighborhoods and nine tools that can mend them.
Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space
Edited by Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, Lynne Elizabeth and Ronald Shiffman
In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, leading planners and social scientists examine public space today and freedom of assembly.
Service-Learning in Design and Planning: Educating at the Boundaries
Edited by Tom Angotti, Cheryl S. Doble, and Paula Horrigan
Urban planning and architecture educators challenge traditional community-university relationships by modeling meaningful and reciprocal partnerships for community-engaged learning.
Acting Together, Vol II: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict: Building Just and Inclusive Communities
Edited by Cynthia Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker
Acting Together, Volume ll, continues from where the first volume ends documenting exemplary peace-building performances in regions marked by social exclusion, structural violence and dislocation.
Acting Together, Vol I: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence
Edited by Cynthia Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker
Courageous artists working in conflict regions describe exemplary peace-building performances and groundbreaking theory on performance for transformation of violence.
Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms
By Lily Yeh
International artist Lily Yeh guides a participatory process of artistic expression that uplifts a distressed community. Her open, joyful approach to art-making is a model for building healthy cultural esteem.
American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice
Edited by William Reichard
Foreword by Ted Kooser
with contributions by Elizabeth Alexander, Linda Hogan, and Sherman Alexie
This new anthology of contemporary American poetry, short fiction and nonfiction, explores issues of identity, oppression, injustice, and social change.
Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation
Case Studies from North America, Scandinavia, Japan, and Great Britain demonstrate natural outdoor teaching environments that support hand-on learning in science, math, language, and art in ways that nurture healthy imagination and socialization.
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs
Edited by Stephen Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth
A timely revisitation of renowned urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs’ lifework, What We See invites thirty pundits and practitioners across fields to refresh Jacobs’ economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. Combining personal and professional observations with meditations on Jacobs’ insights, essayists bring their diverse experience to bear to sketch the blueprints for the living city.
By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives
By Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson
A two-person memoir that explores education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the book’s core are two stories that speak up for human imagination, spirit, and the power of art.
Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame
Beverly Naidus shares her passion and strategies for teaching socially engaged art, offering, as well, a short history of the field and the candid views of more than thirty colleagues.
Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines
By William Cleveland
Foreword by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Lost Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict and heal unspeakable trauma.
Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing
Practical guidance to help both citizens and professionals influence democratic process through written letters, articles, reports and public testimony.
Building Commons and Community
By Karl Linn
Building Commons and Community documents 45 years of the late Karl Linn’s legacy creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities. In this richly-illustrated landscape-format hardcover book, Linn presents his philosophies and practical wisdom.
New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development
An inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development.
Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons through Prison Horticulture
By James Jiler
Inspiring firsthand account of how in-prison vocational training programs at Riker’s Island Jail lead to meaningful post-release employment and reduce recidivism—the Green House and GreenTeam run by James Jiler for the Horticultural Society of New York.
Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted In Eight U.S. Communities
By Robert H. Leonard and Ann Kilkelly
Introduction by Jan Cohen Cruz
Edited by Linda Frye Burnham
Ensemble theater is one of the vibrant, meaningful American performance forms today. It’s more than art—it’s a social movement.
For the distributor’s full catalog of our books click here.