This reading list is presented to accompany The Healing Project, a forthcoming digital archive, music album, and exhibition from composer and artist Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes. This constellation of creative works explores the daily realities of incarceration, detention, and policing in communities across the United States and uses music, visual arts, film, and language as abolitionist action; the project was heavily influenced by many of the books on this list.

You can pre-save Samora's forthcoming album, GRIEF, here.

What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.

In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation.

Mahogany L. Browne’s evocative book-length poem explores the impacts of the prison system on both the incarcerated and the loved ones left behind.

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

The End of Imagination brings together five of Arundhati Roy's acclaimed books of essays into one comprehensive volume for the first time and features a new introduction by the author.

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

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city.

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. 

This timely book persuasively argues that labor and migrant solidarity movements are already showing how and why, in order to fight for justice and re-build the international union movement, we must open the border.

My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter is poet Aja Monet’s ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters—the tiny gods who fight to change the world.

Based on the events of the historic 2013 California prison hunger strike, Flying Kites is a story about resilience, forgiveness, hope, and what it means to find your own voice.

In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means—and how we take steps to get there.

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is a classic study of the intersection of racism and class in the United States.

In his anticipated second poetry collection, Doppelgangbanger, Cortney Lamar Charleston examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community.

Award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection.

Long Term Offenders, or LTOs, is the state’s term for those it condemns to effective death by imprisonment. Often serving sentences of sixty to eighty years, LTOs bear the brunt of the bipartisan embrace of mass incarceration heralded by the “tough on crime” agenda of the 1990s and 2000s.

In 1947, James Hickman shot and killed the landlord he believed was responsible for a tragic fire that took the lives of four of his children on Chicago's West Side. But a vibrant defense campaign, exposing the working poverty and racism that led to his crime, helped win Hickman 's freedom.

I Am Troy Davis, coauthored by Jen Marlowe and Davis’s sister Martina Davis-Correia, tells the intimate story of an ordinary man caught up in an inexorable tragedy.

In 1971, Eddie Conway, Lieutenant of Security for the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of murdering a police officer and sentenced to life plus thirty years behind bars. Paul Coates was a community worker at the time and didn't know Eddie well — the little he knew, he didn't much like. But Paul was dead certain that Eddie's charges were bogus.

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history.

Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, “progress = modernization through industrialization,” to which it has owed its political life?