1 Picture a woman riding thunder on the legs of slavery    ...     Read more →

By Rosemarie Day | Ninety-two percent of working-age adults believe that affordable healthcare should be a right in this country. Regardless of party affiliation, the vast majority of Americans support this position. And yet, this election cycle, the political messaging surrounding healthcare has been dominated by rhetoric that divides us. From a president who claims (falsely) that he is protecting people with preexisting conditions, to one of the two remaining Democratic candidates (Sanders) who champions Medicare for All (“he wrote the damn bill!”, after all), Americans can feel trapped by these polarized positions. Read more →

By J. A. Mills | What happened after the book ended? Did China finally bend to international will and stop farming tigers, rhinos, and bears like cows and pigs? Readers still write to ask me five years after Beacon Press published “Blood of the Tiger: A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species.” My answer, as of this moment—when COVID-19 has shut down much of the world—is this: You can watch the rest of the story unfold in real time. Read more →

She led a sit-in to ensure protections for people with disabilities and laid the groundwork for the Americans with Disabilities Act. She’s calling on all of us to act radically to build a different kind of future for cinema—not only for the women being actively hurt inside the industry but for those outside it, whose lives, purchasing decisions, and sense of selves are shaped by the stories told. She’s proving how a groundswell of activism, led by everyday women, could create the incentives our political leaders need to change course and make affordable healthcare accessible for everybody. Read more →

The coronavirus is an unprecedented crisis that is impacting our lives in significant ways. In our ongoing efforts to promote public safety during the COVID-19 outbreak, Beacon Press staff started working from home last week and will continue to do so until further notice. While some things are in flux, you should know that we are continuing to work hard—and creatively—on getting the books we publish in front of the right audiences. Read more →

By Dina Gilio-Whitaker | Long before there was ever a concept called “feminism” in the US settler State, there was the knowledge of women’s power in Indigenous communities. The imposition of foreign cultures, and Christianity in particular, was corrosive to societies that were typically matrilineal or matrifocal, were foundationally equitable in the distribution of power between the genders, and often respected the existence of a third gender and non-hetero relationships. As Christianity swept over the continent, it instilled Indigenous societies with patriarchal values that sought not only to diminish women’s inherent cultural power but also to pathologize alternative gender identities, relationships, and marriage practices outside the bounds of monogamy, establishing a general pattern of gender and relationship suppression that constructs modern American society and reordered Native societies. Read more →

By Nicole Aschoff | Many of the critiques about smartphones stem from the myriad ways they are used to perpetuate and obscure coercive and unjust relationships. Our pocket computers are used in ways that reconfigure, and often reinforce and renew, existing power inequalities. We see this power inequality most starkly in the relationship between corporations and workers, and between corporations and consumers. In the gig economy our hand machines mediate the employment relationship, encouraging app workers to view their phones as their boss. But our phones are not the boss; companies are. Read more →

I’ve always loved finding that perfect seed at the heart of a story, and thanks to my mom’s early guidance (thanks, Mom!), I’ve had my sights set on a career in publishing for a long time. I spent a few summers working as an intern at a literary agency where my main job was to dig through slush piles full of unsolicited manuscripts, trying to discover the Next Big Thing. It was a great way to practice spotting not just the obviously great stuff, but the stuff that could be great with a little more shaping. That’s where I really learned how to argue for a book’s potential. Read more →

We’re going two for two—our second author to appear this year on The Daily Show! On March 4, Trevor Noah interviewed disability rights activist Judith Heumann on The Daily Show in honor of Women’s History Month. And we’re squeeing again like the book groupies we are! “Reading this book, I expected to be impressed by it, but I wasn’t quite expecting how much of a badass you would be,” Noah told Heumann. And he’s right: she’s a total badass! Read more →

By James W. Russell | If the Bernie Sanders momentum continues, his signature Medicare for All proposal will become an even more intense subject of national debate than it already is. Attaining universal health insurance has never been a technical problem in the United States. We know that because every other major country and a number of minor ones have attained it at much lower cost and with better health outcomes than the private health insurance system that we have. If they can do it, so too could the United States. Read more →