Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor + Michelle Alexander: How We Get Free 2nd Edition

Join us for an event with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discussing the Updated, 2nd Edition of her award-winning book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Joining Keeanga-Yamahtta in conversation is civil rights lawyer and bestselling author, Michelle Alexander. This event is co-presented with Hammer & Hope magazine. For more information, please visit their website at hammerandhope.org. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of How We Get Free (Updated 2nd Edition) here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA-compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by Feb.4 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com

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Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.” —Combahee River Collective Statement

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical Black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members and contemporary activists reflect on the organization’s contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.

This expanded second edition features a new introduction by Taylor and a powerful new interview with Angela Y. Davis.

Hammer & Hope is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is a project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle, and the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of our movement toward freedom.

Photo credit: Hannah Price

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the co-founder of Hammer & Hope. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book, was recently published in an expanded second edition by Haymarket Books, with a new foreword by Angela Y. Davis. ​Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. In 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. With Colin Kaepernick and Robin D. G. Kelley, she edited Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Her latest book is the expanded and updated edition of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, featuring a new introduction by Taylor and a powerful new interview with Angela Y. Davis.

Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, legal scholar, advocate, and bestselling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which has been widely described as a foundational text of contemporary racial justice movements.

A former associate professor at Stanford Law School, where she directed the Civil Rights Clinics, Alexander has held leadership roles across academia and public interest law. Her writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The Los Angeles Times, and she has been featured on major national media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Democracy Now, and The Colbert Show.

She is currently Scholar in Residence at Union Theological Seminary, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in interreligious studies and preparing to launch Spirit of Justice, a new organization dedicated to nurturing the spiritual and ethical foundations of the struggle for collective liberation.