Manisha Sinha at the American Writer's Museum August 2nd

August 2nd 6;30 pm at the American Writer's Museum 180 N. Michigan Avenue 2nd Floor

University of Connecticut Department of History professor and James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History Manisha Sinha presents her book The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, winner of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

The Slave's Cause is a groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War.
Sinha’s research interests lie in United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is a member of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library, co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Civil War Era and Slavery and Abolition. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Dissent, and The Huffington Post and been interviewed by The Times of London, The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Boston Globe, Slate, The Daily Caller, and Gothamist.

Whatever Happened to the Arab Spring July 10th 6pm

Since the first wave of uprisings in 2011, the euphoria of the "Arab Spring" has given way to the gloom of backlash and a descent into mayhem and war. The revolution has been overwhelmed by clashes between rival counter-revolutionary forces: resilient old regimes on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalist contenders on the other. 

Authors Gilbert Achcar and Danny Postel will be discussing the history and current state of the Middle East.  Water and wine provided.

Gilbert Achcar has been called “one of the best analysts of the contemporary Arab world” by the newspaper Le Monde. He is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His many books include Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016), The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013), Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (2013), The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010), Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), and The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (2002). His books have been translated into 15 languages.

Morbid Symptoms offers a timely analysis of the ongoing Arab uprising that will engage experts and general readers alike. Drawing on a unique combination of scholarly and political knowledge of the Arab region, Achcar argues that, short of radical social change, the region will not achieve stability any time soon.  Focusing on Syria and Egypt, Achcar assesses the present stage of the uprising and the main obstacles, both regional and international, that prevent any resolution.

"What happened to the 2011 Arab revolutions? They reverberated throughout the Middle East and North Africa and around the globe, influencing movements from Occupy to the indignados.  Even after the Arab Spring had mostly passed, the wave they helped initiate continued in Gezi Park, the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns, and Black Lives Matter...Drawing on sources in Arabic, English and French, Gilbert Ashcar's Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising offers the clearest and most comprehensive analysis of the fate of these revolutions.  [This book] is a sobering yet generous account of the Arab people's fight for true liberation and the lessons that have been learned from that struggle."--Kevin B. Anderson, Jacobin

Danny Postel is the Assistant Director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern University. He is co-editor of Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017), The Syria Dilemma (2013), and The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2010), and author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran (2006). His writing has appeared in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Dissent, The Guardian, the Huffington Post, In These Times, Middle East Policy, The Nation, The New York Times, The Progressive, and the Washington Post.

Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017) shows that as the Middle East descends ever deeper into violence and chaos, 'sectarianism' has become a catch-all explanation for the region's troubles. The turmoil is attributed to 'ancient sectarian differences', putatively primordial forces that make violent conflict intractable. In media and policy discussions, sectarianism has come to possess trans-historical causal power.

Featuring leading scholars -- and including historians, anthropologists, political scientists and international relations theorists -- this book will redefine the terms of debate on one of the most critical issues in international affairs today.

CLOSED on the 4th

after-words will be CLOSED for the July 4th holiday.

Thank you!

After Hours magazine release July 8th 2-4pm

In the after-words event space, July 8th, 2-4pm.  Help us celebrate the release of After Hours #36, the Summer 2018 issue. Featured reader (and featured writer in #36) is Chicago Poet, Marty McConnell.

Please note that the open mic segment is reserved for past and present After Hours contributors ONLY. Copies of the latest After Hours, as well as back issues, will be available.

Featured reader Marty McConnell's forthcoming second poetry collection, when they say you can't go home again, what they mean is you were never there, won the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and her work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Vinyl, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and Mid-American Review. She is co-founder and editor of underbelly, an online magazine focused on the art and magic of poetry revision. Her first full-length, award-winning collection, wine for a shotgun, was published by EM Press, and her first non-fiction book, Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop, is forthcoming in 2018 on YesYes Books. She is also a seven-time National Poetry Slam team member, the 2012 National Underground Poetry Individual Competition (NUPIC) Champion, and appeared twice on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam."

Celebrating Zora Neale Hurston May 23rd

At the American Writer's Museum 180 N. Michigan Avenue 2nd Floor 6:30-8:30 pm

A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.

In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.

Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

Amistad Books editorial director Tracy Sherrod will discuss the process of publishing Hurston's manuscript with Hurston biographer Laura Litwin.

April 26th 6:30-9:30pm in the after-words event space

Issue launch for issue 2 of a five-part anthology zine.  

AVERSION is a queerly surreal work of freeform horror storytelling by Chicago-based author Aaron Eischeid. Each issue features a unique multimedia build and original illustrations by local artists that bring to life the harrowing tale of Owen, a teenager hurled head and soul-first into a mad doctor’s practice of dangerous and degrading therapy.

“Dummy,” the inaugural chapter released in 2016, is where you first meet Owen in a mysterious waiting room. Here lies a door to madness, inquisition, and coercive Freudian psychology gone gut-churningly awry. 

Now, in the all-new sequel chapter, “Canine,” the scope of Owen’s ‘therapeutic’ journey widens. Beginning in 1800s Russia, a mutt experiences the breakthrough of Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments. There, he meets a strange force who has come to steal and warp those experiences for modern purposes. It is here our protagonist must endure the aversive conditioning of his identity under the nefarious tactics of Your Doctor. Meanwhile, joined by an all-new motley crew of characters, Owen discovers larger spiritual forces at work that could promise salvation…or destroy everything.

Come experience an unforgettable launch event that will include a live, theatrical reading complete with chilling effects followed by a discussion with the author, signing, and free wine and snacks!

Parts 1 & 2 are available for sale for only $5 each.