JOIN US FOR AN IN-PERSON TOWN HALL DISCUSSION ON INSIGHT AS PART OF OBSIDIAN’S MORAL WITNESSING SERIES
Conversation hosted by Duriel E. Harris & L. Renée
March 29, 2025
4–5:30pm PT
In-person at Radical Hood Library
2304 W. Jefferson Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
About Radical Hood Library/Noname Book Club
Noname Book Club is a Black, volunteer-run, community-funded initiative connecting community members both inside and outside carceral facilities with radical books. Each month, they uplift a book written by a Black author and strive for a Pan-African, anticapitalist ethos. They believe building community through political education is crucial for our liberation. They also believe everyone (especially racialized and colonized people) should have access to unlimited educational materials. This is why they make sure all the resources they offer are free.
Since their founding in 2019, they have created 23 book club chapters across the globe and continue to expand internationally every month. In April 2021, Noname Book Club refocused their efforts on expanding their prison chapters and now send books to over one thousand incarcerated comrades. They understand the state is actively working to disappear members of the community. It’s their job to make sure our folks feel taken care of and not forgotten. They believe systems that perpetuate harm against Black people should ultimately be abolished. This includes police, prisons, and all other colonial institutions.
In Oct 2021, Noname Book Club launched Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles. In this space, they do administrative work that keeps the national org going, package and ship out books to prison/jail chapters, and function as a community lending library and third space. Not only are they committed to offering free resources to friends and family behind bars, they also think it’s incredibly important to have revolutionary literature freely available in the local community. The Radical Hood Library offers several programs and political education opportunities to the local community every month at no charge.
Community support is what keeps their project going. Obsidian encourages you to help sustain their programs by subscribing to their Patreon for as little as $1/month.
Noname Book Club Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/nonamebooks/about
Save the Date
March 29, 2025
About the Hosts
Obsidian Town Hall on Insight, March 29, 2025
L. Renée is a poet, story collector, and nonfiction writer. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest, minnesota review, Callaloo, American Life in Poetry, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She won the National Association of Black Storytellers’ 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellowship, representing the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the 2024 Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology at the Library of Congress. Her honors also include The Arkansas International 2023 Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize, the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, and Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Watering Hole, L. Renée is a 2024-2025 Poetry Coalition Fellow at Mass Poetry, awarded by the Academy of American Poets, and a 2024-2025 Public Humanities Fellow, awarded by Virginia Humanities.
Obsidian Town Hall on Insight, March 29, 2025
Duriel E. Harris is the Editor of our favorite award-winning lit mag—Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora—celebrating our living legacies through 50 years of continuous publication and making way for 50 more years of Black lit, Black art, Black Excellence!
