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Pilsen Community Books welcomes Anjali Enjeti and Simona Supekar to the store for an event in celebration of their new books Ballot and Stock Photo.

About Stock Photo: Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Stock Photo mines the visual culture of stock photography, which is used in nearly every facet of the media landscape we consume, including as part of the datasets on which A.I. was trained. Through scholarly discussion and interviews with stock photographers, models, consumers, and more from the United States to India to Palestine, Simona Supekar explores the evolution of the industry by tracing the creation of a stock photo from concept to usage within a larger historical and political context.

A former stock photography keyworder, Supekar weaves in her own industry and personal experiences as a South Asian American in a post-9/11 world. Stock Photo also addresses how these images have the power to shape our perceptions about race, class, caste, gender, ability, and more, thus underscoring the importance of quality representation even in something as seemingly innocuous as a stock photo.

Simona Supekar is Assistant Professor of English at Pasadena City College in California, USA. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she was a 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction finalist for her novel manuscript.

About Ballot: Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

Enjeti lays out the growing challenges for voters in battleground states, where rightwing legislatures have introduced staggering numbers of voter suppression bills and redrawn district lines, all to disenfranchise as many Black and other marginalized voters as possible. As her account of the history and stakes of election integrity shows, the aftershocks of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021 have manifested most egregiously on the four corners of the ballot.

Anjali Enjeti is the award-winning author of The Parted Earth and Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change. Her third book, Ballot, describes voting and voting rights from her perspective as a Georgia voter, poll worker, and electoral organizer, who has volunteered for the campaigns of Jon Ossoff, Stacey Abrams, Reverend Raphael Warnock, and others. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia.