In late 2006, I was on the verge of graduating college with an English degree and had no clue what I wanted to do with it. I’d worked in libraries since age fifteen, always loved books and reading, and really liked helping people with their writing and essays. So, I thought, “Maybe get into book publishing and become an editor.” Read more →

By Landon Y. Jones | The received wisdom is that Donald Trump was an aberration in American political life. Attention to his rise usually focuses on his assiduously cultivated celebrity status and picturesque obsession with acquiring more fame, more praise, and more money. Yet he was hardly the first celebrated American to make a calculated leap into politics. 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 Steve Early | How has the RPA managed to operate year-round for two decades as a multi-issue, membership-based organization and make steady electoral progress in the face of well-funded corporate opposition? Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | Last night was most violent. Some 600 people were killed in attacks on different parts of the Strip. At around 11pm I heard an explosion nearby. The usual sequence: the screech of a rocket, a flash in the darkness, then the explosion. I was lying on the mattress, in the middle of the flat (away from the windows), trying to sleep, and had almost dosed off when I noticed a dark and noxious cloud filling the street. No one seemed to be out there. Read more →

By Steve Early | On a Saturday evening last spring, Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) co-chair Claudia Jimenez hosted a high-spirited rally and party with 200 supporters of her re-election campaign for the Richmond City Council. Jimenez is a forty-six-year-old immigrant from Columbia, who worked as an architect and community organizer before seeking elected office four years ago in her diverse, blue-collar city of 114,000, that’s eighty-percent non-white. Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | I hardly slept last night. For the last two nights I’ve managed to keep a kind of routine: dinner at 8pm, smoke a narghile till 9pm, catch up with WhatsApp messages till 9.15; call Hanna and the kids and talk to them till about 10.45, after which I’m ready to sleep. For two nights it worked. Last night, though, it didn’t. Read more →

A Q&A with Russell Cobb | The natural resource curse is what happens when a given society strikes it rich by extracting some resource and chases after that wealth as other parts of the economy decline. The race to make as much money as possible leads to corruption, inequality, violence, and environmental destruction. Economists and political scientists point to places like Nigeria, Russia, and Venezuela as object lessons in the natural resource curse, but many of those social ills also plague places like Oklahoma and Texas. Read more →

I’ve known since I was little that I wanted to work somewhere in the world of books. My mom is a writer, so while I was growing up, she was my biggest inspiration and always supported me to lean into my love of literature. Some of my favorite childhood memories were discussing books with her—why we liked them, why they felt meaningful, and trying to persuade each other to read our current favorites. 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 Remica Bingham-Risher | I met [Sonia] Sanchez at the second Furious Flower Conference in 2004, where she performed with her band Full Moon of Sonia, and interviewed her a few years later. As we had just begun to get to know each other and I was a young mostly unpublished poet, I was surprised to be invited to a gathering at her house that first evening we sat together. At Sanchez’s party, there was food spread from end to end on a large wooden table; people filled the house and were almost as interesting and varied as the art stationed in every room. Read more →

Since elementary school, I always loved to read and write in my free time and always had my nose in a book. In fact, my mom would have to wrestle my book and flashlight out of my hands whenever she would catch me reading under the covers at night. As I grew older, books and stories continued to remain an important part of my life but fell to the backburner as other academic and cocurricular pursuits took my time. Read more →

By Samira K. Mehta | Since Kamala Harris has become the Democratic candidate for president, her multiracial identity has returned to the news. Harris is the child of a Black Jamaican father and a South Asian mother. You can read that heritage as multiracial, as we are increasingly inclined to do now, but for most of American history, Harris would have been read more or less exclusively as Black. Vice-President Harris has explained that her mother knew this aspect of American race relations, and so she understood that Kamala and her sister Maya would be seen as Black girls and then as Black women. She is a Black woman, a graduate of Howard University. That said, she is Black with South Asian heritage, a multiracial presidential candidate in an increasingly multiracial world. Read more →

A Q&A with Lisa Mueller | Readers will discover that the evidence-based approach that has powered remarkable breakthroughs in medicine, elections, economic development, and other high-stakes endeavors can apply to protests and social movements, too. Activism often feels very emotional, but it can be strategic at the same time. If we want our activism to really improve the world, we should consider which strategies are most likely to produce the desired results, not just those that feel right in the moment. Read more →

As many in publishing would understand, I’m a hopeless bibliophile. My TBR is mountainous, and when I’m not reading, I’m glued to podcasts or YouTube videos about books—and trying my valiant best to persuade friends and family to give my newest hyperfixation read a shot (currently: “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach). Read more →

Like so many people who work with books, I love to read! Reading has always been a massive part of my life—I remember getting in trouble for reading my book during math class in fifth grade—but connecting people with the books I thought they needed felt just as important as reading for myself. As I got older, I started to do political organizing work around prison closure and abolition. In doing this work and speaking to and learning alongside people in prison, it became all the more essential that books reach the people who need them. 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 Michael Andor Brodeur | For millions of gym bros like me, the closure of gyms nationwide amounted to the loss of a primary habitat, a source of identity. And for many of the men I watched unravel online—throwing tantrums on social media over the perceived oppression of public health measures, mask mandates, and home quarantines—the loss of the gym compromised a key source of their manhood. Read more →