New & Recent


$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.


$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 Paperback
128 pages • 5 x 7 inches
Date: 02/13/2024
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-235-2

An old man learns how to die from a younger woman facing death

For the entire six months that Mark Dowie became friends with Judith Tannenbaum, they both knew she was going to die. In fact for most of that time they knew the exact hour she would go… sometime between 11:00 AM and noon, December 5, 2019, which she did. They talked about many things during those months, but the rapidly approaching moment of Judith’s death came to inform and shape their entire conversation. Death was, as she said, “the undercurrent and the overstory of our relationship” … one of the deepest, most profound and fulfilling of Mark’s life. 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

By Margaret Randall

Illustrations by Barbara Byers

$22.95 Paperback
256 pages • 5.83 x 8.27 inches
17 black and white images
Date: 10/17/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-219-2

Fearless personal essays from a treasured feminist poet and activist.

Luck is a collection of essays covering such topics as memory, language, landscape, poetry, anger, sex, food, pandemics, war, violence, feminism, lies, imagination, death, power, identity, and of course luck. Some are full-blown explorations, others brief riffs. Some are prose poetry, others straightforward prose. The author 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.


$24.95 Paperback
304 pages • 6 x 9 inches
10 black and white images
Date: 10/03/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-211-6

Frank, eye-opening writing by “arts in corrections” educators.

Poetry and prose by artists, writers, and activists who’ve taught workshops in U.S. criminal legal institutions, including acclaimed writers Ellen Bass, Joshua Bennett, Jill McDounough, E. Ethelbert Miller, Idra Novey, Joy Priest, Paisley Rekdal, Christopher Soto, and Michael Torres; the late arts in corrections pioneers Buzz Alexander and Judith Tannenbaum; and Guggenheim Award-winning choreographer Pat Graney. These educators demonstrate a diverse range of experiences. Among the questions they ask: Does our work support the continuation or deconstruction of a mass incarcerating society? What led me to teach in prison? How do I resist the “savior” or “helper” narrative? 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.


$22.95 Paperback
288 pages • 5.50 x 8.50 inches
12 black and white images
Date: 09/19/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-215-4

The roles that Christodora House has played from 19th-century settlement house to its newest forms.

Settlement house workers helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars. Many of these houses still exist in the original neighborhoods where they confront the problems of today and advocate for their communities.

Christodora House, founded in 1897 as “The Young Women’s Settlement,” played an important role in the life of immigrants and other residents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For over 50 years, residents and volunteers at Christodora House provided classes, clubs, recreational activities, and medical and dental clinics for thousands of New Yorkers, and then continued to operate programs out of public housing and other locations for more than two decades.

The building at 143 Avenue B, now housing condominiums, has had a tumultuous history since 1948 but still stands, towering over its tenement neighborhood in the East Village. Christodora Inc. is now a nonprofit foundation with offices in Midtown Manhattan, whose staff works with underserved New Yorkers, including youth in the public school system, carrying on a long, distinguished history of service to the city and country.


Stuff: Instead of a Memoir

By Lucy R. Lippard

$44.95 Hardcover
8 x 8 inches
300 color images
Date: 09/12/2023
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-224-6

Colorfully written and illustrated memoir of the activist art writer Lucy Lippard.

Stuff: Instead of a Memoir 
is a short, abundantly illustrated autobiography of the American art writer, activist, and sometime 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, starting with her family roots and her childhood in New York, Louisiana, Virginia, and Maine. Through anecdotal and often humorous memories, we follow the author through her youth, adulthood, relationships, and her thirty-five years in New York City, where she organized dozens of exhibitions, authored hundreds of articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics, the artist’s-book center Printed Matter, and activist artists group PAD/D. Lippard touches on the roles she played in Conceptual Art and the Feminist Art movement in the 1960s through the 1980s. Her accounts of more recent years focus on the art, landscape, culture, and communities of the American Southwest, where she moved in the early 1990s. This “anti-memoir” also mentions Lippard’s twenty-five books, but few of her many honors.


$22.95 Paperback
184 pages • 6 x 9 inches
42 black and white images
Date: 04/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-207-9

Gentrification and displacement of low-income communities of color are major issues in New York City and the city’s zoning policies are a major cause. Race matters but the city ignores it when shaping land use and housing policies. The city promises “affordable housing” that is not truly affordable. Zoned Out! shows how this has played in Williamsburg, Harlem and Chinatown, neighborhoods facing massive displacement of people of color. It looks at ways the city can address inequalities, promote authentic community-based planning and develop housing in the public domain.

Tom Angotti and Sylvia Morse frame the revised edition of this seminal work with a tribute to the late urbanist and architect Michael Sorkin and his progressive and revolutionary approaches to cities as well as a new preface about changes in city policy since Mayor Bill de Blasio left office and what rights citizens need to defend. The book includes a foreword by the late, distinguished urban planning educator Peter Marcuse and individual chapters by community activist Philip DePaola, housing policy analyst Samuel Stein, and both the editors.


$50.00 Paperback Set
576 pages • 6 x 9 inches
24 black and white images
Date: 03/14/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-202-4

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. The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam. 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. Roadside has spent 45 years searching for what art in a democracy might look like. The anthology raises questions such as, What are common principles and common barriers to achieving democracy across disciplines, and how can the disciplines unite in common democratic cause?


$26.95 Paperback
224 pages • 6 x 9 inches
12 black and white images
Date: 03/14/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-194-2

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. Roadside has spent 45 years searching for what art in a democracy might look like. The anthology raises questions such as, What are common principles and common barriers to achieving democracy across disciplines, and how can the disciplines unite in common democratic cause?


$26.95 Paperback
256 pages • 6 x 9 inches
12 black and white images
Date: 03/14/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-190-4

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. The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam.


$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 5.50 x 8.50 inches
18 black and white images
Date: 02/14/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-203-1

As the Bush administration prepared to wage war against Iraq, millions of people in the United States and around the world took to the streets to warn against the impending disaster. It was the largest wave of antiwar protest in history. This is the story of those dramatic events, told by distinguished peace scholar and activist David Cortright. This revealing account offers an insider view of the emergence of the movement and its political and communications strategies in attempting to prevent the attack. It reviews the arrogance of power as senior officials rejected public and expert opinion and rushed ahead with their ill-fated invasion. The book traces efforts by opponents of the war to end the worsening conflict and win Congressional approval for the withdrawal of troops. Cortright explores the role of the Iraq issue and the impact of antiwar networks in propelling Barack Obama to the White House, and the frustrations many activists felt in navigating the limitations of conventional politics. Readable, insightful and passionately argued, A Peaceful Superpower provides a definitive analysis of the impacts of the Iraq antiwar movement and a hopeful look at the power of civil society to shape the course of history.


$34.95 Paperback
224 pages • 7 x 10 inches
15 color images
Date: 01/24/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-198-0

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.” Goldbard describes how the learning from each changed the course of her life in essays that offer generative moments of a life in art and social change. She also reveals ways a dominant society tried to put a first-generation American from a socially marginal family in her place—and failed. Readers will learn about the author’s own self education, issues of formal higher education and its discontents, and the damage done by a society that prizes profits over people. Goldbard asks readers to consider the impact of credentialism on U.S. society and what we can do to set it right.

The “angels” whose work shaped Goldbard’s life are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Paul Goodman, Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Paulo Freire, Isaiah Berlin, John Trudell, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Jane Jacobs. Despite their many differences, each had the gift of questioning assumptions, looking beneath surfaces, and imagining without bounds. The author invites readers to scrutinize their own educations and to honor their own angels.


$34.95 Hardcover
128 pages • 8.5 x 11 inches
51 color images
Date: 09/20/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-187-4

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 crisis of climate change and environmental degradation is the greatest crisis humanity has ever confronted, and it is made many times harder because so many powerful institutions, governments, and corporations are invested in an economy of exploitation. The people in this book diagnose the truth of the problem and point a way forward. Besides fifty inspiring portraits and profiles, the book features original essays by Bill McKibben, Leah Penniman, Diane Wilson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Bill Bigelow.


$19.95 Paperback
176 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
5 black and white images
Date: 09/13/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-174-4
Also available as hardcover or eBook

The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum but also reflects, through both form and content, on the complexities of seeing both the parts and the whole. The book presents different aspects of Judith—poet, teaching artist, friend, mentor, colleague—through a collection of original poetry, prose, essay, illustration, and fiction from 33 contributors. In so doing, it 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.


$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 6 x 9 inches
10 black and white images
Date: 09/06/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-170-6
Also available as hardcover or eBook

​​Inherited Silence tells the story of beloved land in California’s Napa Valley. Author Louise Dunlap’s ancestors were among the first Europeans to claim ownership of traditional lands of the Wappo people during a period of genocide. 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. Inherited Silence offers a way for every reader to evaluate their own current life actions and the lasting impact they can have on society and our planet.


We Built a Village: Cohousing and the Commons

By Diane Rothbard Margolis

Foreword by David Bollier

$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
40 black and white images
Date: 08/23/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-178-2
Also available as hardcover or eBook

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. The group set in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together, even up to creative responses to the recent pandemic.


$30.00 Paperback
352 pages • 6 x 9 inches
59 black and white images
Date: 06/28/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-166-9
Also available as hardcover or eBook

Divining Chaos provides a personal memoir of eco-artist Aviva Rahmani. The story gives insight into her Trigger-Point theory thesis and unparalleled exclusivity to the moments in her life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led Rahmani to two seminal projects: Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied the premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use, Rahmani shares intimate decisions that shaped her life’s work.


$26.95 Paperback
288 pages • 6 x 9 inches
18 black and white images
Date: 06/14/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-154-6
Also available as hardcover or eBook

Meeting the Moment explores experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in the U.S. Cohen Cruz and Pereira present the struggles of artists who stand on the line of both rigorous art-making and community care. 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. The book’s voices from the field point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.


$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 5.83 x 8.27
51 black and white illustrations
Date: 05/24/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-183-6
Also available as eBook

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. She notes: The book provides insight into a country where artistic creativity has always been valued, regardless of what sort of government is in power.


Artists in My Life

By Margaret Randall

Forewords by Mary Gabriel and Ed McCaughan

$30.00 Hardcover
240 pages • 5.83 x 8.27 inches
71 color images
Date: 04/12/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-159-1
Also available as eBook

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.


$26.95 Paperback
352 pages • 6 x 9 inches
50 black and white images
Date: 03/22/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-150-8
Also available as hardcover or eBook

Talking to the Girls is a written memorial to the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The fire broke out on March 25, 1911 on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as “waists.” Talking to the Girls brings 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.


$39.95 Paperback
384 pages • 8.5 x 8.5 inches
45 black and white images
Date: 02/01/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-146-1
Also available as hardcover or eBook

Compiled from 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, EcoArt in Action stands as a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges. Organized into three sections—Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations—each contribution provides models for ecoart practice that are adaptable for use within a variety of classrooms, communities, and contexts.


$49.95 Hardcover
256 pages • 8.5 x 8.5 inches
350 color images
Date: 01/11/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-119-5

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.