FRESH AYERS: "What Saves Us" - A Book Launch

"Far more than a protest anthology, Martin Espada’s What Saves Us brings together portraits of Trump’s enablers with the myriad voices of the lost, abandoned, and marginalized. These stories of immigrants, minimum wage workers, alcoholics, victims, broken angels, and dreamers redeem their lives and install their voices in our hearts." —Cary Nelson, author of Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left

Join us for a book launch of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press). Martín Espada, the editor of the anthology, will read with contributors Tara Betts, Benjamin Balthaser, Tarfia Faizullah, Ruth Goring, Paul Martínez Pompa, Marty McConnell, Lauren Schmidt and Mark Turcotte. Bill Ayers will introduce the event as part of the Fresh Ayers series, with a Q and A and book signing to follow.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the Book: What Saves Us is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—about much more than Trump. These are poems that either embody or express a sense of empathy or outrage, both prior to and following his election, since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes. There is an extraordinary diversity of voices—92 in all. They speak of persecuted and scapegoated immigrants. They bear witness to violence, from police brutality against African-Americans to mass shootings. They testify to poverty. There are voices of labor, in the factory or the fields. There are prophetic voices, imploring us to imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and act. However, this is not merely a collection of grievances. The poets build bridges, taking back the language, resisting the demagogic corruption of words themselves, asserting our common humanity. Contributors Tara Betts, Benjamin Balthaser, Tarfia Faizullah, Ruth Goring, Paul Martínez Pompa, Marty McConnell, Lauren Schmidt and Mark Turcotte will join editor Martín Espada for this special Chicago-area book launch. 

About the Author: Martín Espada (editor) has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest collection of poems is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). He is the recipient of the 2018 Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latinx community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.