By Christian Coleman | The start of the forty-seventh administration in the White House sounded off the red alert for mothers of all stripes in the US. They were already on high alert during the years leading up to the 2024 elections. For the next four years, mothers will be Mothering with a capital M against this administration’s wrecking-ball rampage. Mothers making sure people who can become pregnant get the abortion care they need. Mothers who take in gay and trans children who’ve been rejected by their blood relatives. Read more →
154 posts categorized "Christian Coleman"
By Christian Coleman | Four months into this administration defined by an onslaught of draconian executive orders, we finally have some good news. Just a week after publication, David Pakman’s “The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America” made it to the New York Times Best Seller List! It ranked number six on their print hardcover list and number seven on their combined print and e-book list! Read more →
By Christian Coleman | It wasn’t just Black History Month that Google Calendar removed from its holiday list. They did away with Women’s History Month, too. Just check your phones. In true fashion of an avowed fascist’s pick me, Big Tech was thorough with the forty-seventh administration’s anti-DEI scourge. But we said it once and we’ll say it again: We don’t need you to recognize Women’s History Month. Keep on with pandering to the patriarchy as we keep this party rolling. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Did you check your phones? Is it any shock that Google Calendar genuflected to the current scorched-earth administration’s anti-DEI tour and removed Black History Month from its holiday list during Black History Month? Is it a shock that they claimed their holiday list wasn’t “globally scalable or sustainable?” Talk about Big Tech being an avowed fascist’s pick me. Doublespeak and all. Well, guess what, Google Calendar? We don’t need you to recognize Black History Month. Read more →
A Q&A with Jeanne Theoharis and Gayatri Patnaik | When I published the original edition, I did so without being able to see a cache of Rosa Parks’s papers that had been held for years by Guernsey’s auction following a dispute over her estate. In late 2014, Howard Buffett, horrified by a news story about how Rosa Parks’s papers and effects were being held by this auction house, instructed his foundation to act, bought them and then donated the papers and photographs to the Library of Congress. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | And the New Year’s category is . . . Transformation! As the oligarchs of the free world steer us on a rocky ride toward dire changes we didn’t want, we’ll be focused on changing ourselves for the greater good. What shall we work on? Expanding our minds about what Buddhism is and what it has to offer? Ditching the me-centric trend of girlboss feminism? Renegotiating our relationship with social media? Beefing up at the gym without the macho trappings? This handful of titles from Beacon’s catalog will set us on the runway of life to get tens across the board for progress and self-reinvention! Read more →
By Christian Coleman | If last Christmas, you gave someone your heart, and the very next day, they gave it away, this year, to save yourself from tears, you’ll give it to your TBR list! ALL our books are 30% off through December 31 during our holiday sale! Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s OG text has had more than one life. Published in 2014, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” is the third installment of Beacon’s ReVisioning History series, created by Beacon Press director Gayatri Patnaik. Now, a decade later, there is more than one way to read and radically reframe four hundred years of US history through the lens of Native American struggle and resistance. The book has even been adapted to two other genres, too! Read more →
By Christian Coleman | It’s going to be another four years of accelerated survival mode. The results of the election greenlit the sequel of the orange demagogue franchise we didn’t want. And now we need to brace ourselves for it. However, the frustration, the anger, and the grief from the spoils of November 5 are still raw. As such, some recuperation is in order. Facing the sequel can wait. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Here we are again with the nail-biting tension from four years ago. The neck-and-neck polls between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump alerted our attention to other issues at play in addition to the debate and rally talking points. Lies about voter fraud that distract us from how voter suppression at the systemic level threatens our voting rights. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | A Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month unmarred by election-year drama would have been a miracle. No such luck in 2024. Not with anti-immigrant rhetoric regrowing its Hydra’s head when right-wing candidates take to the debate and rally stages. If that weren’t enough, Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month started off with news that Jeanine Cummins will release new novel next year about the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | And the category is . . . Challenged! Challenged as in a hair’s breadth away from being banned. For Banned Books Week, United Against Book Bans released the latest roundup of challenged books, and ten Beacon Press titles are on it! Tens across the board for each one strutting their red-alert stuff! Some are par for the rabid far-right course—Race and history and queers! Oh, my!—while others, indeed, will make you do a double take. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Normally, we could keep our cool, but this season we’re wilding in a dangerous mood. Can you match our timing? Because we’re in a dangerous mood for some summer reading. These titles from our catalog will make you sweat, make you hotter, make you lose your breath, make you water. They will blow your mind! Hopefully, you can last the whole season. Read more →
Image credit: Bequest Just what does one do when the sun blazes and the humidity churns the air into chunky Campbell soup? Tell that attention-seeking season called summer “Thank you, but no thank you” and camp out by the A/C... Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Rainbow season is in full, fierce bloom, honeys! Take to the streets with your most fabulous fans and clack them with pride! Clack them to reflect, empower, and unite for queerness in all its joys and liberation! Clack back to the haters intimidated by queerness! Because this is your month. They all are, really. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | This Sunday, it’s dad’s turn to be given his flowers—or tie or power tool or gift card. You get the idea. Our flowers come in the form of books, some of which are written by fathers. Books for the daddies and zaddies on their muscle-bound journey. For the House fathers taking the rejected queer kids under their wing. For the feminist dads who don’t want to go the way of the Kens in “Barbie.” For the fathers living from hustle to hustle to keep a roof over their loved ones’ heads. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | “How do you teach a kindergartener about the histories and contemporary legacies of race and racism in a way that affirms her humanity and agency?” Dr. OiYan Poon poses herself this question in the introduction of “Asian American Is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family” after her three-year-old daughter Té Té broaches the topic of race. An answer to her question could be found by turning to this year’s theme for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Read more →
A Q&A with Amy Caldwell and Perpetua Charles | I’d worked with Ra Page, Atef Abu Saif’s editor at Comma Press in the UK, on a previous book, The Drone Eats with Me, which chronicled Abu Saif’s experiences on the ground in Gaza during the 2012 Israeli incursion. And then last fall, after the post-Oct 7 Israeli campaign and invasion of Gaza began, Ra reached out. I didn’t know Atef had been visiting Gaza on October 7, and it was, of course, distressing to hear. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Sometimes it happens by trailblazing a path in a testosterone-choked arena. Sometimes it happens through organizing to demand the end of bias and discrimination from our lives and institutions. Sometimes it happens in the quiet of her personal life. And, of course, it happens through her writing. These are some of the ways empowered women empower women through history and today. Read more →
By Christian Coleman | Remember when Janelle Monáe said Black women aren’t a monolith? Same goes for the Black diaspora, and yet the Grammys love plugging their ears and going La la la la laaaaa. This year, they did Black artists dirty yet again, snubbing them in the award for Album of the Year. Jay-Z is far from the first to call out their snubbery at the ceremony. They’ve also been called out for confining Black artist nominations in the rap/hip hop and R&B categories. Read more →