Politics and Prose Presents

Europe is a place of free movement among nations--or is it? The Schengen area, established in 1985 and today encompassing twenty-nine European countries, allows people, goods, and capital to cross borders without restraint. Schengen transformed European life, advancing both a democratic project of transnational citizenship and a neoliberal project of international free trade. But the right of free movement always excluded non-Europeans, especially migrants of color from former colonies of the Schengen states. In Europe without Borders, Isaac Stanley-Becker explores the contested creation of free movement in Schengen, from treatymaking at European summits and disputes in international courts to the street protests of undocumented immigrants who claimed free movement as a human right.

Schengen laid the groundwork for the making of a single market and the founding of the European Union. Yet its emergence is one of the great untold stories of modern European history, one hidden in archives long embargoed. Stanley-Becker is among the first to have access to records of the treatymaking--such as letters between France's François Mitterrand and West Germany's Helmut Kohl--and Europe without Borders offers a pathbreaking account of Schengen's creation. Stanley-Becker argues that Schengen gave a humanist cast to a market paradigm; but even in pairing the border crossing of human beings with the principles of free-market exchange, this vision of free movement was hedged by alarm about foreign migrants. Meanwhile, these migrants--the sans-papiers--saw in the promise of a borderless Europe only a neocolonial enterprise.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691261768?ic_referral=4PdMwp3wpcu2NcuIRQxH07hDKPAMLjpj1-lle2lj3BEwM83qQ24xUSmzdUd9rbBZxX0zhNV_LyDeKrqtwrUDNOhBTkm5zZO6fXJP0t1jh8Ww_3iyjsgNCgQkbbNBEBw6OBbxUA

Isaac Stanley-Becker is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post who has reported from across Europe and the United States. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Stanley-Becker is in conversation with Ishaan Tharoor. Tharoor is a columnist on the foreign desk of the Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. In 2021, he won the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary, a prize administered by the American Academy of Diplomacy. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York. He also periodically teaches an undergraduate seminar at Georgetown University on digital affairs and the global age.

*recorded 2/22/2025

The artistic vision and business acumen of Michael Kahn, the founding Artistic Director, largely catalyzed this transformation, but so too did the forces of neoliberalism and, more recently, globalization and new media. Accordingly, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company not only examines directorial decision-making but also 3 decades of social and economic change in the nation's capital, from the complexities of gentrification to the arts policies of successive administrations.

In addition to discussions of directorial practice, this book examines the ambivalence of American theatre artists toward their British cultural inheritance. Analyses of representative productions and interviews with Kahn and his British successor, Simon Godwin, illuminate this complex relationship: one that aspires to a cosmopolitan Anglophilia while positioning classically trained American actors as worthy rivals to their counterparts at the RSC and the National Theatre of Great Britain.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781350352681?ic_referral=CTwN4cOdfTchQoNBJM0I07poHkh26uZRw7H7uxBQt_EwM06isspnqbxym6LkJ7fYPvcCzdMmRNk5k-8w3FllyjLjqBQ--mWmO7HwzkiE6d9sMX8HqADkuWP3OxCyesokx0bicw

Drew Lichtenberg has been resident dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, USA, since 2011. He has worked as a dramaturg, literary manager and translator-adaptor with the Royal National Theatre, Public Theater, Roundabout, La Mama, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCarter Theatre Center, Yale Rep and Baltimore Center Stage, among others. As an educator, he has taught courses at Catholic University of America, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, and Eugene Lang College at the New School. His publications include The Piscatorbühne Century (2021).

Deborah C. Payne is Professor Emerita of Literature at American University, USA. She was the Humanities Research Consultant at the Shakespeare Theatre Company from 2000 – 2009, and she has dramaturged for Studio Theatre, Arena Stage, the Kennedy Center, and the Bach Sinfonia. Her publications include Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company (with Drew Lichtenberg, The Arden Shakespeare, 2024), The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660 – 1700 (2024), Revisiting Shakespeare’s Lost Play (2016), Four Restoration Libertine Plays (2005), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (2000) and Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theatre (1995).

Lichtenberg and Payne are in conversation with Trey Graham. Graham is a D.C.-based journalist who covered theater for the Washington City Paper for two decades. He received the George Jean Nathan Award for distinguished drama criticism in 2004.

*recorded 2/22/2025

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Black girls and women faced a harsh career landscape. Domestic labor and sharecropping--which were the least regulated and lowest paying occupations for women in the US economy--were the few available ways for Black women and girls to make a living in Jane Crow America. In response to these circumstances, Nannie Helen Burroughs, the pioneering Black American educator and civil rights leader, established the National Training School for Women and Girls (NTS) in Washington, DC. Nannie Helen Burroughs tells the story of the powerful labor movement that resulted from Burroughs's work at the NTS and in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. The NTS proved to be a revolutionary labor and educational initiative that redefined household employment as a profession where social justice for the Black community could be achieved. The NTS was integral to a Black clubwomen's labor movement that paved the way for a broader transformation of the economic landscape for Black women and girls. Nannie Helen Burroughs establishes Burroughs as one of America's most influential labor leaders in the twentieth century and reveals the powerful lessons her work and ideas still offer for America's laborers, labor organizers, scholars, and women's rights and racial justice activists today. It also establishes Burroughs and her colleagues in the National Association of Colored Women as the architects of an unprecedented labor movement.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781647125288?ic_referral=8BFlFaWELUYHzZbntiVeWOpFQvfDEDC28lgO1WRgjYQwM9-mqVogDPow5yUNAFrC6RsnfTYTUiEEukyvvSBg2pNuBmLsrH-gC6RHjJLekT9A3fqOPhn_EnX0FcGvIpeurohDig

Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the recipient of the National Women's Studies Association's Sara A. Whaley Book Prize for Putting Their Hands on Race (2020).

*recorded 2/21/2025

In the tradition of Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Andrea Elliot's Invisible Child, Disposable is a poignant exploration of America's underclass, left vulnerable by systemic racism and capitalism. Here, Sarah Jones delves into the lives of the essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by COVID-19--not due to their age or profession, but because of the systemic inequality and poverty that left them exposed.

The pandemic served as a stark revelation of the true state of America, a country where the dream of prosperity is a distant mirage for millions. Jones argues that the pandemic didn't create these dynamics, but rather revealed the existing social mobility issues and wealth gap that have long plagued the nation. Behind the staggering death toll are stories of lives lost, injustices suffered, and institutions that failed to protect their people.

Jones brings these stories to the forefront, transforming the abstract concept of the pandemic into a deeply personal and political phenomenon. She argues that America has abandoned a sacrificial underclass of millions but insists that another future is possible. By addressing the pervasive issues of racial justice and public policy, Jones calls for a future where no one is seen as disposable again.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982197421?ic_referral=bLVxmN-9BnezfHQp65Bc0_L5weHTyI55IUJ-47Epr84wM18Oz18RDsIVkdR0Jqz6ad_3EdYGz59V50OiXpfntLC8ppj9L9KNf4Wlog9myRusUshSwA1TmpYcdIJIy_Dl1SAfyw

Sarah Jones is a senior writer for New York magazine, where she covers politics and religion. She was previously a staff writer for The New Republic and her work has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Dissent magazine. Jones won the 2019 Mirror Award for commentary and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is active on social media (@OneSarahJones). Originally from rural Washington County, Virginia, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Jones is in conversation with Tim Shenk. Shenk is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University, senior editor at Dissent, and the author, most recently, of Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics. 

*recorded 2/21/2025

Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? In this deeply reported book, Katherine Stewart takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, backroom strategy gatherings, and services at extremist churches, and profiles the people who want to tear it all down. She introduces us to reactionary Catholic activists, atheist billionaires, pseudo-Platonist intellectuals, self-appointed apostles of Jesus, disciples of Ayn Rand, women-hating opponents of "the gynocracy," pronatalists preoccupied with the dearth of white babies, Covid truthers, militia members masquerading as "concerned moms" and battalions of spirit warriors who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about attacking democracy at its foundations.

Along the way, she provides a compelling analysis of the authoritarian reaction in the United States. She demonstrates that the movement relies on several distinct constituencies, with very different and often conflicting agendas. Stewart's reporting and comprehensive political analysis helps reframe the conversation about the moral collapse of conservatism in America and points the way forward toward a democratic future.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781635578546?ic_referral=8oF0Q2WlZbEiuPVQ4BiCEYE4CFV-21EnLITylMAhhYkwM-smn1LfzuG4GnTP3szZIMnhTUupiAnnUBG93PcoLST5FO4d5-7lpU96jfxtedhoF4ZCcVVKrx5OFW2eTlwWEEtnaQ

Katherine Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. She writes about politics, policy, and religion for The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and The New Republic. Her previous book, The Good News Club, was an examination of the religious right and public education.

Stewart is in conversation with Rep. Jamie Raskin. Rep. Raskin proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he also served as the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, the highly-acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students, and the New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen's books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.

But Austen wasn't a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers--and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen's work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn't a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase "pride and prejudice" came from Frances Burney's second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen's bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn't Romney--despite her training--ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?

Jane Austen's Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen's heroes--women writers who were erased from the Western canon--to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth--and recounts Romney's experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen's. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen's bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen's Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982190248?ic_referral=vJC3Qr_pu2URrASdMMISkFQAcyDnyf9tC1Pbpq-1gMswM13CaFaeNJ-M3pmTqiuRSxuM-gakDSDC4EGMFrQBc6Zx6-ThtfIsCIFjPSJnElKSVZ3FG7N0mAfR1WopbUwVIO68Xg

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the HISTORY Channel's show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Romney is the author of Printer's Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (with JP Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769­-1999. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).

Romney is in conversation with Stephanie Stillo. Stillo serves as chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress, where she leads the development, stewardship, interpretation, promotion and service of the collection to meet the needs of government officials, scholars and the public. Prior to her appointment in 2023, she held the position of curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection and Aramont Library. Stillo holds a Ph.D. in modern European history and specializes in the history of printmaking and historical book illustration.

David Levering Lewis — The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 - with Steve Inskeep — at Conn Ave

Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.

There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis's lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia.

Lewis's father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall's collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.

In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781984879905?ic_referral=8jecE--JOvK5YWZMsjMJ300BET5JB3h4xzR-EPlqjyQwMw8Mj64wJfkJ9z1x4ejSnn-pyXKj70NmBT2SYk84mRxS_epGasaqq8jps5w2LhJqKSTNlNJy-aRfYZIfDdfXBR9Nnw

David Levering Lewis is professor emeritus of history at New York University. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Lewis received the Pulitzer Prize for each volume of his W. E. B. Du Bois biography. He is the author of ten books. Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the Wilson Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the MacArthur Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Lewis is in conversation with Steve Inskeep. Inskeep is a cohost of Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio program in the United States, and of NPR’s Up First, one of the nation’s most popular podcasts. His reporting has taken him across the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Pakistan, and China. His search for the full story behind the news has led him to history; he is the author of Instant City, Jacksonland, and Imperfect Union, and now Differ We Must.

*recorded 2/19/2025

Please join Tamika Mallory in conversation about her coming-of-age memoir I Lived to Tell the Story with veteran journalist and Black Press USA Washington Bureau Chief and WH Correspondent, April D. Ryan and former First Lady of DC, Cora Masters Barry. In this candid and defiant memoir, a follow-up to her "masterful" (Marc Lamont Hill, New York Times bestselling author) response to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, State of Emergency, Tamika D. Mallory holds nothing back as she shares hers, the activist's life.

From early days as daughter to Black civil rights activists in Harlem, New York, to a young Black woman's first battles against the physical and political violence she'd fight all her life, to the never-before-shared personal and professional crises launched by those forces intent on keeping her silent, this is a work of activism in motion and an unflinching story of America at the turn of the 21st century.

Ultimately, I Lived to Tell the Story is a celebration of the profound truth that our hearts grow closest when we discover that the values we share are grounded in personal truths as well as high-minded aspiration.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982173494?ic_referral=du3qsypokj5_THdhwp053aBZKT8WriEqvXIIzuYXy3swM5Nz9UmNbaxGilRoeEuoIg07AQNh-JHIj8FqQnVC2-r0pdkzJn4gPUHUpmvH7Gc0hK5S-4tRBDVqvCeqs8jif410Lw

Tamika D. Mallory is a trailblazing social justice leader, movement strategist, globally recognized civil rights activist, cofounder of Until Freedom and the historic Women's March, and author of I Lived to Tell the Story and State of Emergency. She served as the youngest ever executive director of the National Action Network. Her speech in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota--entitled "State of Emergency"--was dubbed "the speech of a generation" by ABC News. Mallory is an expert in the areas of gun violence prevention, criminal justice reform, and grassroots organizing.

*recorded 2/18/2025

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America's history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country's landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.

Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America's landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation's true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593299159?ic_referral=ez2syieKYD_dpr9Mw0FmRTpP4vSbInbHSgr7BZFIF7YwM645cxykPo400DldtJDvnWoHDbzZJFSqVtjWADskMqGbVGiY1IBUHYClOJ3TZ-3_hY4s_o15sFv7lmTDDtVeuAybog

Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. He teaches at Queensborough Community College and at City College of New York in the MFA in Creative Writing program. His writing has been fea­tured in Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College, and he has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foun­dation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

Weathersby is in conversation with Jamila Minnicks. Minnicks' novel Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books, 2023), won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is a finalist for the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was longlisted the 2023 Crook’s Corner Book Prize. Her short stories and essays are published in The Sun, CRAFT, Catapult, Blackbird, The Write Launch, and elsewhere, and her piece, Politics of Distraction, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jamila’s work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
 
Jamila is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law, and the Georgetown University Law Center. She lives in Washington, DC.

*recorded 2/16/2025

A lifetime of stories to tell. Growing up, Marita would listen to bedtime stories of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and many other champions of Black history. Now a champion herself in the literary world, she shares her story in a motivational autobiography you will never forget. How to Become a Black Writer details Marita Golden's life, career, and the most cherished memories she made along the way. From nurturing her passions during the civil rights movement to celebrating her 40th writing anniversary in D.C., Marita shows that every dreamer can inspire others with their story.

A love letter to Black authors and readers. How to Become a Black Writer is not only just Marita's story, but can also be the start of yours. Inside, you'll find lessons and instructions based on her experiences during the renaissance of Black literature to help you cultivate your voice. Featuring timeless knowledge that helped not only Marita, but bestselling storytellers like Nzotake Shange and Toni Morrison, you, too can make a big change in the book publishing world.

Discover meaningful events and the people behind them that helped Marita Golden to become the leading icon she is today, such as:

• How she was mentored under feminist poet Audre Lorde
• Life as a groundbreaking journalist at Essence Magazine
• Co-founding and leading the Hurston-Wright Foundation to help publish Black stories

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781684817153?ic_referral=oxN8rF4YNBtcZDnCVNmGu5AHPpQUy90wHYiFJWSrhb8wMxgIA0ehi7goDVtTTTOualE4_Qz2OvberDZySL1xbp_yoyRL9yxn2vkepumhkA6B0QFPbEIaKcJN9Q9G3D3BqSxWKA

Marita Golden is a bestselling author, journalist, activist, and consultant famous for crafting over 20 fiction and non-fiction works. Starting as a freelance writer and editor for magazines such as The New York Times and Essence Magazine, she released her debut memoir, Migrations of the Heart, in 1984. Since then, she has published renowned books such as Saving Our Sons and Don't Play in the Sun, as well as novels like The Edge of Heaven and After. Marita has also led several lectures and workshops, as well as founding the Hurston-Wright Foundation to help current and future Black authors bring their stories to life. She currently lives in Washington D.C.

Golden is in conversation with E. Ethelbert Miller, a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller is Associate Editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Miller’s latest book is How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask, published by City Point Press.

*recorded 2/15/2025