Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today’s guest is Jessica Hoffmann of make/shift, one of Utne’s 50 visionaries of 2008. We asked her for five links, and here’s what she gave us (check back for tomorrow’s guest, Jessica Valenti of Feministing):
Community Supported Publishing: South End Press is the only radical, feminist, majority-women-of-color book-publishing collective in the United States. The voices and ideas they’re publishing are challenging, inspiring, and critical to social-justice movement in the United States. I particularly love their Community Supported Publishing program, which applies a CSA model to book publishing: Starting at $20/month, you can provide consistent sustenance to an essential, paradigm-shifting independent publisher, and in exchange you’ll receive every new book they publish, as well as selected backlist titles and discounts on everything else.
Ali Smith is probably my favorite contemporary fiction writer. Very little of her work–which is beautiful, formally inventive, always moving, queer (in so many ways), and unhesitatingly politicized–is available on the Web, but thanks to textualities.net, which is making the archives of Scottish Book Collector magazine available free online, you can read this lovely story right now.
The Radical Women of Color Blog Ring: Scroll past the ads for a list of links to bloggers engaging in grassroots organizing, critical dialogue, storytelling, and so much more around shared–though not homogenous–visions of a world without violence.
The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism:Tyrone Boucher and Dean Spade edit this inspiring, thought-provoking, and always-growing collection of ideas about how to connect a political belief in economic justice to personal financial choices.
Sundays off! About six months ago, I started a new habit of not turning on my computer on Sundays. While there’s a lot of stuff I love online, I also love creating some regular space away from this zone. Sundays are now about puttering about the apartment, reading books and magazines in print, cooking, being outside, talking to people face-to-face, and otherwise recalibrating in the midst of a life in which many, many hours are spent staring at this screen.
Bio: Jessica Hoffmann is a coeditor/copublisher of make/shift magazine and a freelance writer/editor. Her essays and reportage have appeared in numerous independent media outlets, including ColorLines, Alternet, Bitch, the late and lamented NewStandard and Kitchen Sink, and the anthologies We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, and Making Connections: Mother-Daughter Travel Tales. She contributes to the group LGBTQ blog The Bilerico Project and is walking and writing with the blogger brownfemipower in a collaborative blog project called (Re)Thinking Walking, which happens on Mondays at brownfemipower’s blog, Flip Flopping Joy. Last year, Utne Reader named her one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”
Previous Alt Wire Guests: Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,Fatemeh Fakhraie,Joe Biel,Anne Elizabeth Moore
