Julian Aguon in conversation with Rebecca Solnit, celebrating the publication of "No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay" by Julian Aguon, published by Astra Publishing. This live event took place in Kerouac Alley, between City Lights and Vesuvio Cafe, and was hosted by Peter Maravelis.

You can purchase copies of "No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/no-country-for-8-spot-butterflies/

Julian Aguon is a Chamorro human rights lawyer and defender from Guam. He is the founder of Blue Ocean Law, a progressive firm that works at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice; and serves on the council of Progressive International—a global collective with the mission of mobilizing progressive forces around the world behind a shared vision of social justice. He lives in the village of Yona. Visit julianaguon.com

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. She is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including "Whose Story Is This?, Call Them By Their True Names" (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), "Cinderella Liberator," "Men Explain Things to Me," "The Mother of All Questions," and "Hope in the Dark," and co-creator of the "City of Women" map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, "The Faraway Nearby," "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster," "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," "Wanderlust: A History of Walking," and "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West" (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her memoir, "Recollections of My Nonexistence," was released in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.

This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation