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Pilsen Community Books is excited to join Under the Tree Podcast in welcoming Mark Nowak and Bill Ayers to the store for an event in celebration of Mark's new book ...AGAIN, a harrowing documentation of the expansive landscape of MAGAmerica.

Told through five abecedarian prose sections, . . . AGAIN is a photo-text commentary on MAGAism in America. In his sobering voice, Nowak captures the depredations of capitalism, the desensitizing regularity of mass shootings, and the extremism that has fueled white nationalism. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection through Donald Trump’s re-election, Nowak chronicles the transformations as the seasons change around him, attempting to make sense of a bitterly divided nation that elected a polarizing figurehead . . . again.

Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN, all from Coffee House Press. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Creative Capital foundations. Nowak’s work on poetry by incarcerated writers of the 1970s includes his introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022) and his essay “Workshops of Abolition: Attica Print Culture and Small Press Poetry,” published in The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020 (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is founding director of the Worker Writers School.

Bill Ayers is the author, most recently, of When Freedom is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) and a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers College, Columbia University. He is an engaged scholar and a peace and social justice activist who has written extensively about social justice and freedom, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is a former vice-president of the curriculum division of the American Educational Research Association, and a former member of the executive committee of the Faculty Senate at UIC.