The Word Is Change: Books, Used & New

06/19/2026

This week let's get bell hooks not some other book titled Communion on the bestseller list :)

Let's get bell hooks on the best-seller list!

06/16/2026

6/25 (Thursday) at 7pm Q***r Pride, Overseers and the Racial State: The Word is Change is proud to host a pride month conversation between writers Emmaia Gelman (The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State) and Steven Thrasher (The Overseer Class) about pinkwashing, carceral politics, and organizing for Palestine in the racial state.

This is the final event for the summer for Steven Thrasher’s powerful The Overseer Class, which explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—but under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain.

Emmaia Gelman’s book tour for The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State which interrogates how the ADL, often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire, is just getting started.

Link below for more information a the praise Robin D.G. Kelley offers on both books.

06/15/2026

TONIGHT: REAL MEN ON TOP: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality by Yale philosopher Robin Dembroff, who will be in conversation with How Fascism Works author Jason Stanley about gender as the internal logic of our current fascist moment. (more info in comments)

05/04/2026

Thursday May 7th at 7pm

How To Sell a Genocide: �The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
with Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi of [citation needed]

A gripping exposé of how the corporate media fuelled genocide in Gaza

As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework.

How to Sell a Genocide is a thorough indictment of US corporate media’s role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitized Israel’s war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanized the Palestinian people.
Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonization of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the US media.

All royalties from the book will be donated to the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

04/27/2026

A May Day/Kujichagulia/Sankofa celebration of �A Strange Celestial Road �and the 50th anniversary of Wildflowers (The New York Loft Jazz Sessions)
Ahmed Abdullah with Ed Hazell and Pheeroan akLaff

The discussion will revolve around the 50th Anniversary of the Wildflowers Recordings done at Studio RivBea, May 14th-23rd 1976 and how we can use what we learned to move forward in the 21st century

In A Strange Celestial Road, a captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra.

Ahmed Abdullah joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement

May 1st at 7pm
The Word Is Change
368 Tompkins Ave Bed-Stuy

And be sure to check out the amazing performances Saturdays in May at Sistas’ Place

04/27/2026

Two nights in Brooklyn
On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland explores the role of Black dance music and sonic politics in recurring struggles over race and space in Oakland, California.

Insisting on the centrality of sound in everyday social movements, Alex Werth argues that Black dance music is not merely a soundtrack to or record of urban resistance, but, rather, its very sound waves have animated looping clashes over development, dispossession, and Black freedom.

Alex Werth,
in conversation with Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers
�Wed. April 29 at 7pm
The Word Is Change, 368 Tompkins Ave. Bed-Stuy Brooklyn

And Tuesday April 28th 7-10pm
with Allie Martin and Tara Duviver
afterparty with DJ BiggieMaules
Rodeo
1134 President St.

04/13/2026

On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland explores the role of Black dance music and sonic politics in recurring struggles over race and space in Oakland, California.

Insisting on the centrality of sound in everyday social movements, Alex Werth argues that Black dance music is not merely a soundtrack to or record of urban resistance, but, rather, its very sound waves have animated looping clashes over development, dispossession, and Black freedom.

Alex Werth,
in conversation with Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers
�Wed. April 29 at 7pm
The Word Is Change, 368 Tompkins Ave. Bed-Stuy Brooklyn

04/13/2026

Join Colleen Asper with artists Katherine Behar and Chang Yuchen, composer Julie Harting, and translator C. Luke Soucy for the launch of to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice.

This zine was produced as part of Asper’s exhibition at Baruch’s New Media Artspace of a four-part video which remediates a 2021 performance by Colleen Asper and Julie Harting. The title, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, describes the limitation imposed on the character Echo—to only speak the last words she hears.

Echo’s story is intertwined with that of Narcissus in Ovid’s original tale but largely left out of subsequent retellings of Narcissus’s encounter with his reflection. Asper instead intervenes to “see Echo and Narcissus as making up two sides of mimesis, reflection of the self and reflection of the other, but also auditory and visual mimesis.”

The zine to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice collects the score and script from the 2021 performance and responses from 22 practitioners across disciplines to the question: “How do you think about repetition in your work?”

For this event Colleen Asper and Julie Harting will share their contributions to the performance, Katherine Behar and Chang Yuchen will discuss their art practice, and C. Luke Soucy will read from his 2023 translation of Metamorphoses.

Monday, April 20 at 7PM
The Word Is Change, 368 Tompkins Ave. Bed-Stuy Brooklyn

04/13/2026

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
Book Release with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
Sunday April 18th at 7pm

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC q***r trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It's a road map for survivors looking for something that's neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale - not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.

Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost a cherished friend and comrade and met their estranged parents' end of life.

This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.

Masks are Mandatory. Please bring one, but we will have some available