We’re excited to welcome Zeke Caligiuri and Bill Ayers to the store for an event in celebration of American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion.

“This is a volume edited by the imprisoned, because the history of class has always been written by the powerful.”

This groundbreaking anthology of essays edited by incarcerated writers takes a sharp look at the complexity and fluidity of class and caste systems in the United States. Featuring accounts that include gig work as a delivery driver, homelessness among trans youth, and life with immense student loan debt, in addition to transcripts of insightful discussions between the editors, American Precariat demonstrates how various and often invisible extreme instability can be. With the understanding that widespread recognition of collective precarity is an urgent concern, the anthology situates each individual portrait within societal structures of exclusion, scarcity, and criminality.

These essays write through the silence around class to enumerate the risks that our material conditions leave us no choice but to take. A rendering of the present moment told from below, American Precariat shares stories of the unseen and the unspoken and articulates the lines of our division. In doing so, it offers healing for some of the world’s fractures.

Zeke Caligiuri is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, and a contributing editor of the anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023). He has won multiple awards through the PEN Prison Writing Contest and is the co-founder of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country. He is a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books, 2022) as well as School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Pushout and Mass Incarceration. As an incarcerated writer, his work has been widely published in journals and anthologies for years. He is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration, and now does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center, helping to build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition by empowering system-impacted people to reinvest in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.

Bill Ayers is an author, activist, and educator whose books include with Crystal Laura and Rick Ayers “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!” And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers’ Unions, and Public Education (Beacon Press, 2018), Demand the Impossible! A Radical Manifesto (Haymarket Books, 2016), Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation (Teachers College Press, 2016), Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident (Beacon Press, 2013), with Ryan Alexander-Tanner To Teach: The Journey in Comics (Teachers College Press, 2010), with Bernardine Dohrn Race Course: Against White Supremacy (Third World Press 2008), with Rick Ayers Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2011), Teaching toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2004), with Kevin Kumashiro, Erica Meiners, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall Teaching toward Democracy: Educators as Agents of Change (Paradigm, 2010), A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Beacon Press, 2001, 2008), On the Side of the Child: Summerhill Revisited (Teachers College Press, 2003), Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice (Teachers College Press, 2004), The Good Preschool Teacher: Six Teachers Reflect on Their Lives, (Teachers College Press, 1989), and To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, (Teachers College Press, 1993) which was named Book of the Year in 1993 by Kappa Delta Pi, and won the Witten Award for Distinguished Work in Biography and Autobiography in 1995.

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