About

Authors

Faith Beauchemin

Faith Beauchemin is a writer, activist, blogger, and independent feminist scholar from Detroit, Michigan, currently living in Anniston, Alabama. In 2013, she was a member of a student/alumni protest group which fought against the right-wing shift at Cedarville University in Ohio. Since then, she has been active in the Homeschoolers Anonymous community, a blog and online support network for people who grew up in the fundamentalist Christian homeschool subculture. Her work on the HA blog focuses on feminist and anti-authoritarian critiques of Christian homeschooling. She is also active in other online social justice communities.
She is the editor of How Queer!: Personal narratives from bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, sexually fluid and other non-monosexual persepctives, a collection of personal narratives centering the diversity and revolutionary aspects of non-monosexual identity.
Her research interests include feminism, queer theory, radical history, labor, and personal narratives as an agent both of social control and social change.

Lenni Brenner

Lenni Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. He became an atheist at 10, and a left political activist at 15. His involvement with the Black civil rights movement began on his first day in the organized left, when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the "freedom rides" of the early 60s. He was active in the mid 50s with Bayard Rustin, later the organizer of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I had a dream" March on Washington.
He was arrested three times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent thirty-nine months in prison when a court revoked his probation for marijuana possession, because of his activities during the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the University of California. Immediately on imprisonment, he spent four days in intense discussion with Huey Newton, later the founder of the Black Panther Party, who he encountered in the court holding tank. Subsequently, upon his release in 1968, he worked with Kathy Cleaver and other Panthers.
Brenner was an antiwar activist from the first days of the Vietnam war, speaking frequently at rallies in the Bay Area. In 1963 he organized the Committee for Narcotic Reform in Berkeley. In 1968 he co-founded the National Association for Irish Justice, the American affiliate of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. He worked with Kwame Ture (AKA Stokely Carmichael), the legendary "Black Power" leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the Committee against Zionism and Racism, from 1985 until Ture's death in 1998.
Brenner is the author of four books: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Jews in America Today, and The Lesser Evil: A study of the Democratic Party. In 2002 he edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, which contains complete translations of many of the documents quoted in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and The Iron Wall. In 2004 he edited Jefferson & Madison On Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism. In 2013, Brenner co-authored Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity with Matthew Quest. His books have been favorably reviewed in eleven languages by prominent publications, including the London Times, The London Review of Books, Moscow's Izvestia and the Jerusalem Post.
Brenner has written over one hundred articles for many publications, including New York's Amsterdam News, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, The Atlanta Constitution, CounterPunch, The Jewish Guardian, The Nation, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Middle East International, The Journal of Palestine Studies, The New Statesman of London, Al-Fajr in Jerusalem, and Dublin's United Irishman.

Joseph Edwards

Joseph Edwards (born George Myers, also known as Fundi, the “Caribbean Situationist,” and Montgomery Stone) was a Jamaican refrigeration mechanic and labor organizer from West Kingston. Edwards led a wildcat strike and workers’ council at Western Meat Packers in Westmoreland, and was a major organizer of the Unemployed Workers Council and Independent Trade Union Advisory Council.
A profound critic of electoral party politics and trade union hierarchy, Edwards was among the most proletarian theorists of his generation. His pamphlets, written in the 1970s and ’80s, survey attempts to organize workers in banana and sugar cane fields, bauxite mines, clerical offices, and industrial factories. His unique writing is animated by a Rastafarian-influenced philosophy of history and direct democratic politics that emphasize the role of workers’ and village councils in Caribbean class struggle. The first published collection of writings by Joseph Edwards, Workers Self-Management in the Caribbean is now available from On Our Own Authority! Publishing.

Ole Birk Laursen

Ole Birk Laursen is a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Lecturer in Postcolonial Indian Literature at NYU London. He is the editor of Lay Down Your Arms: Anti-Militarism, Anti-Imperialism, & the Global Radical Left in the 1930s and M.P.T. Acharya's We Are Anarchists: Essays on Anarchism, Pacifism, and the Indian Independence Movement, 1923–1953.

Nani Ferreira-Mathews

Nani Ferreira-Mathews is a freelance journalist and independent musician from Vidalia, Georgia, currently living in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2011, she was an activist during the most radical days of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
She is the author of Birthright? Travelouge of an American Radical in Israel/Palestine, a critical study and personal account documenting themes of racism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, and militarism that she experienced as a participant in the popular Jewish-only “birthright” trips.
As an independent scholar, Ferreira-Mathews has an interest in communication and decision-making practices within communal lifestyles. She has studied squats, communes, and intentional communities in the North America, Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

Christian Høgsbjerg

Christian Høgsbjerg is a historian who works at Leeds University Centre for African Studies in the UK. He is the author of C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Duke University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto, 2017). He is the editor of a special edition of C.L.R. James’s 1934 play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (Duke University Press, 2013) and a new edition of James’s pioneering anti-Stalinist history World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Duke University Press, 2017). He has also co-edited two volumes, The Black Jacobins Reader (Duke University Press, 2017) and Celebrating C.L.R. James in Hackney, London (Redwords, 2015). He is a member of the Socialist History Society, the Society for Caribbean Studies, and the editorial board of International Socialism.

Modibo Kadalie

During the early and middle 1970′s, Modibo Kadalie was an active member of several radical organizations. In the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), he served as a member of the Central Staff and Chair of the People’s Action Committee. in Highland Park, Michigan. In the International African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), Kadalie was a founding member of the National Steering Committee. He chaired the Detroit local committee in 1972 and 1973, and then continued as a member of the expanded International Steering Committee as a representative from Atlanta, 1973-1975. Within this Sixth Pan-African Congress, he chaired the Southern Regional Organizing Committee from 1974-1975 and was also a member of both the North American Delegation and the North American Left Revolutionary Pan-African Caucus.
Modibo Kadalie holds degrees from Morehouse College, Howard University and Atlanta University was an Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Savannah State University. He has recently retired from his teaching position Fayetteville State University.
Dr. Kadalie is the author of Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the Struggle of Social Classes (One Quest Press, 2000) and has contributed a new introduction to our new edition of Kimathi Mohammed's Organization and Spontaneity.

Eusi Kwayana

Eusi Kwayana is a Pan African and independent socialist activist, teacher and writer from Guyana. He has been a colleague, critic, and mentor to Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, and Walter Rodney, who are often regarded as the triumvirate of major personalities that have shaped Guyana’s political history. His political analysis has anticipated direct democracy and workers self-management as synonymous with the spirit of Black autonomy and multiracialism among the Caribbean New Left.
Kwayana is the author of The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics. A classic of Caribbean radical history, this text leads its reader to reconsider the nature of representative government and electoral politics. Through Kwayana's detailed engagement with bauxite workers in Guyana during a period of heightened class conflict, Black Power became synonymous with Black workers control, and stood opposed to hierarchies of Black capitalism and state power.
Kwayana is also the author (with Tchaiko Kwayana) of Scars of Bondage: A First Study of the Slave Colonial Experience of Africans in Guyana.

Kimathi Mohammed

Kimathi Mohammed (1948-2002) was an intellectual personality affiliated with the political network surrounding the the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) in 1970s Detroit, and the author of the classic 1974 pamphlet Organization and Spontaneity. This remarkable and concise work plainly asserted that the Black working class must take the lead in the struggle for Black autonomy, and called for a break with Leninist conceptions of party organization and the emerging Black political class.
Our new, updated edition of Organization and Spontaneity includes a later essay by Mohammed titled "Beyond Measure: CLR James’ Influence on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers," and additional material by Modibo Kadalie and Matthew Quest. We would like to thank Patricia West and Dedan McClinton for helping to make this republication of Mohammed's work possible.

Matthew Quest

Matthew Quest is the editor of Lynch Law in Georgia & Other Writings, a collection of selected pamphlets by Ida B. Wells, for which he also authored an extensive introduction. Matthew is also the editor of Workers' Self-Management in the Caribbean, a collection of essays and pamphlets by the Jamaican libertarian socialist activist, Joseph Edwards. In 2013, he co-authored Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity with Lenni Brenner.
Dr. Quest received his PhD in American Civilization from Brown University and has taught American History, World History, Caribbean History and Africana Studies most recently at Georgia State University.

David Weir

David Weir is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He is the author of Decadence and the Making of Modernism(University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), James Joyce and the Art of Mediation (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism(University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (State University of New York Press, 2003), Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890-1926, and American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). He is also the author of Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye (On Our Own Authority!, 2015), a study of the influential French filmmaker, Jean Vigo.

Andrew Zonneveld

Andrew Zonneveld is a historian and naturalist from Atlanta, Georgia. He is a co-founder of On Our Own Authority! and the Atlanta Radical Book Fair, and a council member of the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology in Midway, Georgia.
In 2019, Andrew compiled and edited Modibo Kadalie's Pan-African Social Ecology, for which he also authored a biographical introduction. He is also the editor of The Commune: Paris, 1871, a collection of classic anarchist and libertarian socialist studies of the Paris Commune, and To Remain Silent is Impossible: Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman in Russia, a collection of the two anarchists' critical writings on Lenin's Russia. He also co-authored (with Robert Sabatino) "Radical Politics, Labor Revolt, and the Life of Sen Katayama," an introductory essay to Katayama's classic The Labor Movement in Japan.

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