View from Tree Frog Farm (photo: JoAnn Wypijewski)
A red sun at night, meteorologists say, signals high pressure and pleasant days ahead. ‘Red sky at night a sailor’s delight’ and all that. That red sun from the vista where Kopkind convenes signifies pressure, for sure; as for pleasant weather, sociopolitically speaking, that’s something that people have always had to imagine and strive to realize.
Kopkind’s summer project turned 25 this year. Twenty-five years of bringing together left journalists, activists and filmmakers, and providing a space for people to ‘dream, dream big’, as one of our participants once said; to analyze the contemporary situation, learn together, think together, imagine paths forward and strategies to get there. And, along the way, to breathe, to recharge. To take pleasure in the good that life, nature, art and camaraderie have to offer. To remember history, its numberless named and unnamed people who have always had to fight, who faced times far harder than ours and sought to make a world fit to live in.
At Kopkind we’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to this project over the years with their time, their ideas, their donations, their words and images, knowledge and experience, their force of personality and generosity of spirit, their physical labor, their challenging questions, their social memory, their ability to create moments of profound collective insight and joy. We all will need such gifts — and spaces to share them and more — going forward. It’s not going to be an easy time. It never has been easy. And the pressures aren’t just national and global; they’re on us individually and organizationally.
So here comes the money part. Whether Giving Tuesday or Giving Anyday, this project needs you. Please help Kopkind continue to help the organizers, the writers, the mediamakers and sensemakers, the researchers, the artists, the thinkers and doers, defenders and troublemakers, workers all, as we strive with others for that better day. Thank you, with urgency and commitment.
In this, Kopkind’s 25th year, whether youcan give $25 or $250 or $2500 or anything in between, please hit the Donate button in the top bar here; or, if you wish to write a check, please make it payable to Kopkind and send c/o JoAnn Wypijewski, 356 East 13th Street #11, New York, NY 10003. All gifts to Kopkind are tax deductible to the full exent allowable by law.
We leave you here with one more picture because, when words aren’t fully adequate, nature reminds us that even as night bears down, there will be light.
From Tree Frog Farm, another time (photo: Mac Christopher)
We first met filmmaker Ann Bennett in the summer of 2009. She had a formidable body of work by then, having been involved in the making of Citizen King, the Emmy-winning Hymn for Alvin Ailey, the mini-series Africans in America and America’s War on Poverty, all for PBS. She came to film camp, Kopkind’s partnership with the Center for Independent Documentary, with a project she was co-producing about photography in Afro-American life. In a sunny morning seminar she laid out her own mind-picture of moments preserved in numerous private snapshots and professional photographs, all of them accumulated in a documentary album, telling a story of a people whose histories were often undocumented and unparticularized when they weren’t caricatured. As she spoke, it was as if the images were spread out on the table before us, the memorialized individual instances of black people seen through black eyes, revealing something about collective experience that had been long obscured.
Ann was born on March 16, 1963, in Baltimore. She died at 61, on November 15, 2024, in New York. An obituary page photo gallery of her public life evokes that summer memory: pictures of her with collaborators and friends, of her alone (as in the uncredited image above, which sure looks to be set during the golden hour at Tree Frog Farm), the array reflecting the qualities that people who loved and admired her would try to put into words. Ann was wise, generous, a mentor to younger filmmakers and women in tech, a person who thrived in collaboration with others, a woman who was dedicated, who sparked one to think afresh, whose smile was pure sunshine, who exuded joyfulness, even when in considerable pain.
The next time Ann came to film camp, in 2018, her health problems were evident; her passion and radiance, undimmed. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, directed by Thomas Allen Harris, had come out in 2014 to much acclaim. A community engagement project, which we had been invited to imagine with her in that long-ago summer, had taken off in multimedia roadshows called Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, with audiences exploring the role of photography in the contest between “self-affirmation and negation,” and celebrating a common humanity. She came to the film workshop again the next year, 2019, bringing a work in progress she was co-producing about the battle between public housing residents in Miami’s Liberty City and a combine of government officials and real estate interests determined to drive them from their home. She brought the film’s director, Katja Esson, who had to leave suddenly one day, upon learning that bulldozers were moving again on the storied black inland neighborhood — high ground, now called a potential “goldmine” by speculators foreseeing the fate of beachfront as the oceans rise.
Razing Liberty Square aired as part of the PBS Independent Lens series this past January. The public housing project, which readers might recall as a key location in Barry Jenkins’ great film Moonlight, is gone. The developers, who had assured residents of their right of return to bright new buildings, broke their promises. They also tried to stop the documentary from being aired. The film is the record of an assault on a community, and a vehicle for ongoing popular resistance. It has a continuing life in discussions on confronting climate gentrification; in organizing against further displacement, and understanding, across the country, the mesh of climate, race, class and housing justice; in agitation by those who’ve been disbursed and those still living in Liberty City to restitch their community. “Please don’t give up,” Samantha Kenley, one of documentary’s main characters, said at a public meeting in March. “Please do what y’all need to do because if we shut up, nothing is going to happen.”
Ann’s work succeeds her.
Desireena Almoradie, who was part of the film camp cohort in 2018 and who conveyed the sad news of Ann’s death, writes, “I first met her at Kopkind, and our connection grew to a deep friendship that included her consulting on my film, and me bringing breakfast to her every morning when she was in physical therapy rehab a few blocks from my home. Ann was generous, kind, and always happy to share her knowledge, her information about filmmaker opportunities, and her deep well of loving kindness. She urged us to do our thing and make a difference.”
Yesterday, in wishing John Scagliotti a happy birthday, we noted the many encounters with history that his filmmaking has provided. Here is one with Audre Lorde from After Stonewall: From the Riots to the Millennium. It offers words especially pertinent in this time. Put them in your backpack for the road ahead!
November 14: Things already bad are about to get worse. The government-in-waiting is swiftly taking shape as a den of punishers, fraudsters, mercenary-symps, crypto freaks, opportunists and fascists-by-whatever-name. As a first order of business, the future ‘border czar’ declared, undocumented immigrants have every reason to be afraid. So do protesters, leftists, ‘vermin’, we have been told repeatedly. Fear is the point. We need clarity now, and courage. ‘Are we going to be okay?’ a liberal interviewer asked writer and Kopkinder Jeff Sharlet the other day. ’No’, Jeff said. ’Some people will not make it. There will be losses.’
November 14: The ‘we’ is the question. ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’, the International Workers of the World affirmed. ‘Don’t mourn; organize’, Joe Hill said before he died. History has been one bloody thing after another, and the old lines still serve as practical, not romantic, guides. ‘In politics, no matter how bad the situation, there is always something to do’, the writer and veteran of decades of struggles Frank Bardacke, also a Kopkinder, remarked the other day. ‘You just have to find the other people to do it with.’ We have heard from our alums who are talking with others about mutual aid, survival projects, defense projects. It’s early days. We have had conversations with some of our people who say, Yes, but I still see that long game, building the left, building for a future, for humanity.
November 14: John Scagliotti, Kopkind’s co-founder, administrator and animating spirit, was born on this day 76 years ago. Humanity got a gift that day. A gay man, an anti-imperialist, a human liberationist and independent media pioneer, John is attentive to history. ‘We’ve always had to fight’, he says. He’s right. His life and work evince that. The same is true for Kopkind, which across 25 years has encouraged, connected, sparked hundreds of people in struggle, people with long memories or fresh hopes that another world is possible.
So today we say Happy birthday, John. We salute you, with love and gratitude. We remember those whose trials and resistance you preserved for us on film.
And salutations to everyone who’s working to find a way. To anyone who’s able, we will gratefully accept a contribution to Kopkind in honor of John, his work and inspiration, and all the work we have to do together going forward. (Click the Donate button on the banner at the top.)
Film camp, a seminar/retreat collaboration between Kopkind and the Center for Independent Documentary (CID), begins on August 4, gathering documentary filmmakers from around the country to workshop their films-in-progress and refresh themselves for the work ahead.
Capping this year’s session, we are proud to present a wonderful new documentary, “The Blues Society”, by Augusta Palmer, on Saturday, August 10, at 7:30 pm, at Tree Frog Farm, 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford. This is a free public event.
Augusta, who will be on hand for the screening and discussion after, was at film camp a couple of years ago, workshopping this film, which tells the origin story of the first Memphis Country Blues Festival. It was 1969. In Memphis, a city with one of the richest musical histories of anyplace in the world, blues masters and beatniks created a festival that rocked the foundations of conservative America. Segregation may have been out by law but not in fact, and the violence that enforced it has never been legislateable. “The Blues Society” weaves hypnotic musical performances with animation, archival images and a chorus of voices to create a moving image mixtape that both celebrates the music and its makers and documents an era.
“There is always a disconnect in the deep context of the music, which is violence and pain and hurt”, one of Augusta’s interviewees says in the film. And still there is the sound, the musicians, the genius and their glorious legacy.
Please join us on August 10 for what promises to be a terrific evening.
One of the rich pleasures of going to the movies is the chance to talk about it after. Kopkind’s Movie Night on Saturday, July 27 – 7 pm at 118 Elliot in downtown Brattleboro – will feature the documentary Israelism, followed by comments from special guests from the Palestine solidarity movement of Western Massachusetts, who will then engage the audience in discussion. In the project’s tradition, this is an inter-generational group, with two people who have been doing organizing and activism together for more than twenty years, and two who have worked together on a number of actions over the past year, including the UMass Amherst encampment. The event is free and open to the public.
A bit more about our guests, in their own words:
Hind Mari was born and raised in Palestine. She was nearly 6 years old when the Six-Day War took place in June 1967, placing her city of Nablus under Israeli military rule. She has vivid memories of the bombings and the earliest days of Israeli military occupation. In early September of that year, her dad, who was a school superintendent, was jailed for six weeks for going on strike and refusing to start the new school year as a protest to a ban by Israel on 84 textbooks.
Hind likes to call herself (and her brother) the original BDS organizers for their refusal to buy Israeli candy in 1967, and for convincing the neighborhood kids to follow suit. She went to college in Nablus, Occupied Palestine, where her education was interrupted by school closures, roadblocks and jailings. She earned a Fulbright for her master’s in 1986 and came to UMass Amherst, where she earned her doctorate and continues to work.
Alisa Klein grew up an ardent Zionist in a Jewish American family, and lived as a teenager and young adult on a kibbutz in the north of Israel. She completed high school there, served two mandatory years in the Israeli army, and attended university in Tel Aviv. What she experienced in the army, and then studied at university, ultimately brought her to an understanding of the inherent inhumanity and genocidal nature of the settler colonial project that is Zionism and the State of Israel. After writing her master’s thesis in Amman, Jordan, and serving as the editor of a Bethlehem-based online journal of alternative analysis of Israel and Palestine, she returned to the US as an ardent Palestine liberation activist and annual visitor/activist to the West Bank. Since 2000, she has lived and conducted activism in Northampton in Western Mass.
Molly Aronson grew up in an observant Jewish and politically minded household, and became skeptical of Israel and the Zionist project at an early age. In college at the University of Michigan, they were one of a few vocal Jews advocating for divestment, and later got involved in more radical Palestinian solidarity movements. While Zionism had made Jewish spaces unattractive for most of their life, learning about the history of anti-Zionist Jews and organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace opened up a new road into organizing for Palestine and connecting with their own faith, history and lineage. Since October, Molly has been organizing for Palestine in Western Mass with Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace Action and the Western Mass Coalition for Palestine. They were a lead organizer of the 25 Mile March for Palestine – a march the length of Gaza that mobilized more than 600 people from Northampton to Springfield, MA.
Louai Abu-Osba is a Palestinian American, born to parents from Salama, Palestine. Salama was the first village to be ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias from Europe during the Nakba. He grew up primarily in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, with a sprinkling of Connecticut, Maryland and Qatar. He graduated from Hampshire College in 2003, where he was elected student commencement speaker. During his commencement speech, Louai characterized Israel’s founding as genocide, its policies in occupied Palestine as apartheid, and strongly advocated for Hampshire College to divest its endowment from Israeli companies. Louai has worked as a content creator and software engineer in media and entertainment ever since, and recently founded The ArtStead, a permaculture and experiential media lab focused on social justice, climate change and community activism.
Israelism tells the story of two young Jewish Americans who were raised to love Israel unconditionally but whose perspectives take a sharp left turn when they witness the brute realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over US policy in the Middle East and modern Jewish identity.
We decided to show this film now because despite the multicultural, multiracial, multigenerational masses demanding a ceasefire and opposing US complicity in genocide in Gaza – in other words, the evidence of one’s own eyes and reality – so much media and political bloviation has sought to downplay or even erase not only the participation of young Jewish Americans in the protests and campus encampments but the decades’ long movement for Palestinian liberation in this country.
Simultaneously, the vast majority of reportage on Israel and Palestine in most anyone’s memory – as well as on the genocide in Gaza – has invisibilized the Palestinian experience or rendered it narrowly, prejudicially, often stupidly or in a deliberately deceptive fashion. Our guests on the 27th are all involved in the current movement. Hind and Louai’s life experiences as Palestinian, what they want audiences of the film to know and be thinking about beyond the confines of its story, are especially critical to any informed consideration of the solidarity movement and of this crisis for the people of Gaza, the Occupied Territories, the diaspora and the world. A genocidal war is everyone’s business. Given longstanding and current US foreign policy, every American has a responsibility to try to stop it.
The question of Palestine and a people’s right to self-determination have been part of Kopkind’s concerns from the start of this project. They were critical issues that Andrew Kopkind wrote about and analyzed in his journalism. Alisa Klein, who has been the central organizer of the panel for the upcoming post-screening discussion, was a ‘camper’ at the Kopkind/Eqbal Ahmad Initiative seminar/retreat on the Middle East in 2003. This free Movie Night culminates Kopkind’s first session this summer, with political journalists and organizers, who have been meeting and thinking for the past week on the theme ‘The Politics of Life vs. Death’.
Kopkind began its first seminar/retreat session in this 25th anniversary year on July 20 with left journalists and organizers who hail from as far away as Lafayette, Louisiana, as near as Brattleboro, and towns and cities in between – who focus on issues as diverse as tenants’ rights and the criminalization of dissent; workers’ power and land use; body autonomy and tech sector organizing; prison abolition and, for all, both ending the genocide in Gaza and stopping fascism at home. Their mentors for a week built around the theme “The Politics of Life vs Death” are Margaret Cerullo, who was one of Kopkind’s first mentors, in 1999; and Dania Rajendra, who was a young Kopkind ‘camper’ in 2001. As do often the case, we’re bringing it all home.
We’re putting on two free public events at 118 Elliot in downtown Brattleboro this week. Everyone in the area: please come!
Wednesday, July 24, 6:30 pm: Speaker’s Night. Margaret Cerullo will speak on the Zapatista movement and prospects in Mexican politics under its new president, the first woman to hold the post. Margaret, a professor emerita of sociology and feminist studies at Hampshire College, has focused on social movements, global migration and Latin America, having been involved with the Zapatista movement since its emergence on the world stage on January 1, 1994. Her latest book, co-edited with her fellow members of the Lightning Collective, is a translation with commentaries: Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World. The book’s foreword is written by Kopkind president and program director JoAnn Wypijewski. The collective’s introduction quotes Andy Kopkind, whose Nation editorial almost immediately upon the 1994 uprising remains a model of historical analysis, political acuity and style. Margaret’s talk will be followed by discussion. This event is being hosted by the Windham World Affairs Council.
Saturday, July 27, 7 pm: Movie Night. Featuring Israelism, a documentary by Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, about two Jewish Americans whose consciousness takes a sharp left turn as they see the brute realities of occupation firsthand and later pronounce, “We came to Israel and left from Palestine”. The screening will be followed by comments from a panel that represents the long-building grassroots movement for justice in Palestine: Hind Mari and Kopkind alum Alisa Klein, a Palestinian-American and Jewish Israeli-American, respectively, have been doing Palestine liberation organizing and activism together in Western Mass for more than 20 years; Louai Abu-Osba, a Palestinian-American who organizes with the Western MA Coalition for Palestine, and Molly Aronson, a Jewish American who is a central organizer of the Western Mass chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, have worked together on a number of actions over the past year, including the UMass Amherst encampment. This panel will then engage the audience in discussion.
Kopkind recognizes the essential connection between language, history, analysis and action in the realization of Freedom Dreams, as Robin D. G. Kelley discussed at a Kopkind public event years ago. The Zapatistas, as Andy explained way back in 1994, surprised the world with their rebellion, but its roots went deep, and they persist. “They have infused left politics”, Cerullo writes, “with an imaginative, literary, or poetic dimension—organizing horizontally, outside and against the state, and with a profound respect for difference as a source of political insight, not division.”The movement against genocide in Gaza and US complicity is the profound insurgent development in the US this year, but it too did not come out of nowhere. Kopkind mentor Dania Rajendra, a journalist and activist who has been working at the crossroads of capitalism and authoritarianism, has long been involved with Palestine solidarity, and her work on the political instrumentalization of antisemitism to promote anti-Muslim bias, racism, patriarchy and exploitation is used by community organizers in the US and Europe.
Please join us!
Kopkind has done remarkable things across the past quarter century. Our mentors have included eminent radical historians like Peter Linebaugh, brilliant longtime strategists and organizers like Makani Themba (who, along with Margaret, was our first mentor), astute independent journalists like Alexander Cockburn, who was a great friend of Andy’s. Our young participants have gone on to play critical roles across the country in the founding of Black Lives Matter, in youth organizing, in Palestine solidarity, in documenting the rise and political agenda of Christian nationalism, in advancing ideas about economic democracy and collective ownership, in fighting homophobia and the culture war, in arguing for abortion and bodily autonomy, in telling stories out of a queer/feminist/black radical tradition, in fighting the state’s power to kill and imprison, and in presenting alternatives. Our filmmakers have told luminous stories about culture and politics through the lives of Lorraine Hansberry, Howard Zinn, Susan Sontag, William Kunstler, Bayard Rustin, Gilda Radner, and the experiences of communities, movements and individuals around the world. Our events have, like the seminars, raised provocative ideas but on a public stage – from Robin Kelley, Edward Said (via film), Laura Flanders, Eddie Glaude, Patricia Williams, Kenyon Farrow, Jeff Sharlett, Tariq Ali, Najla Said, Elena Letona, Vijay Prashad, Grace Paley and more.
Andy Kopkind wrote out of a left analysis, a gay sensibility, a profound curiosity and sense of history, a resistance to inhumanity and a radical hope. This living memorial has strived to honor and advance all of that across the 25 years. In troubled times, we continue to keeping the left alive.
Kopkind has always relied on the kindness of friends and strangers. Please hit the Donate button above to contribute to this project that is unlike anything else.
Pride month is every month when you live arms open to humanity. June is special, though, as we honor the memory, the audacity and the promise of liberation that the Stonewall Uprising represented, and still represents.
CineSlam, Kopkind’s annual Pride month festival of lgbtq short films, takes place this year on Saturday, June 29, at 4pm at the Latchis Theater, on Main Street in downtown Brattleboro. These short films – some narrative, some documentary, some experimental – draw from the well of queer experience. They are serious and moving, funny and fantastical. They are fabulous and real.
Please join us for films, fizzy drinks, Pride cake and celebration of all that’s been won and the ongoing work for liberation. For tickets, please go to https://filmfreeway.com/CineSLAM/tickets
This is a big year for anniversaries: • 55 years since gay people said No to police repression and the closet, and Yes to life in full: those messages exploding in the streets of Greenwich Village around the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969. • 30 years since the death of Andrew Kopkind, who, among much else, wrote the most beautiful summation of the politico-cultural meaning of the riots at the quarter-century mark. (Read on.) • 25 years since Andy’s family and friends started Kopkind, a living memorial, which since the summer of 1999 has created space for left journalists, activists and documentary filmmakers to come together to exchange ideas and experience, workshop films, and follow in Andy’s spirit of thinking deeply, living expressively and extending the field for freedom, pleasure and imagination. 25 years of putting on not just the seminar/retreat sessions at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford but also a plethora of public events, including CineSlam.
We’ll be telling you more about this year’s project and our July events in a future post. On August 24, what would have been Andy’s 89th birthday, we are celebrating our 25th with an outdoor barbecue, speakers and celebration at Tree Frog Farm. Watch for more on that too!
For now, Andy gets the last word, from an article in The Nation’s issue of July 4, 1994:
“Craig Rodwell, a witness to the war in the streets, said in an interview for the documentary Before Stonewall that what was most magical about the Stonewall riots was that ‘everything came together that night.’ Somewhere in the existential depths of that brawl of screaming transvestites were all the freedom rides, the anti-war marches, the sit-ins, the smoke-is, the be-ins, the consciousness-raising, the bra-burning, the levitation of the Pentagon, the endless meetings and broken hearts. Not only that, but the years of gay men and lesbians locking themselves inside windowless, unnamed bars; writing dangerous, anonymous novels and articles; lying about their identity to their families, their bosses, the military; suffering silently when they were found out; hiding and seeking and winking at each other, or drinking and dying by themselves. And sometimes, not often, braving it out and surviving. It’s absolutely astonishing to think that on one early summer’s night in New York that world ended, and a new one began.”
Andy in August, from his and John’s summer scrapbooks (photo: John Scagliotti)
The good people at the Brattleboro Words Project, chiefly Lissa Weinmann, write to tell us that their podcast this month features a sound documentary about Andy Kopkind. It was made by our dear friend, comrade, collaborator and Kopkind honorary board member Maria Margaronis. Maria was Andy’s first intern at The Nation. She is a beautiful writer, a sensitive radio documentarian (mostly for BBC Radio), a deep soul. Her episode for the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast is a love letter, a memento, an evocation of Andy and John and the world they created at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford, Vermont, which inspires everything we’ve been doing at Kopkind for 25 years now. We are grateful to Lissa, Maria and everyone who was involved in producing this beautiful piece, which we send out with love.
The picture here was taken during one of Andy’s famous birthday celebrations. This year we will be hold a celebration of Kopkind’s 25 birthday on Andy’s birthday, August 24, at Tree Frog Farm. More details to come, but Save The Date: 8/24/24!
January 1, 2024, will mark 30 years since the Zapatistas burst onto the world stage, rebelling — as Andy Kopkind wrote in The Nation at the time — against ‘a new world order … that intrudes in the most pernicious manner on the way of life of people always overlooked’. It was an armed revolt that regained some land plundered from indigenous people and was met with state terror, but inspired the desiring world anew. ‘They have infused left politics’, our companera Margaret Cerullo writes, ‘with an imaginative, literary, or poetic dimension—organizing horizontally, outside and against the state, and with a profound respect for difference as a source of political insight, not division.’ And they persist. This new year they will be celebrating their decades’ long phase in 500 years of indigenous resistance in the Americas.
The desiring world is the one we inhabit, perched between cynicism and hope, painfully aware of the bleak old world but rejecting its shackles on the imagination. The future will not be foreclosed, we say, never sure except in the belief that the opposite is unacceptable.
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Augusta Palmer, who at film camp in 2022 workshopped Blues Society, which promises to be a marvelous documentary on the Memphis Country Blues Festivals, held in the tumultuous years from 1966 to 1969, wrote John Scagliotti this year on his 75th birthday: ‘Film camp was a game changer for me. One of my characters says, “We were filled with eroici furori, poetic furor … I always thought that was the best thing that could happen to you, to be thrown together with this group of people who had a heroic enthusiasm.” He was talking about the blues, but Kopkind was like that for documentary. Thank you for that gift.’
Continuity and change have been central to Kopkind from the start. A living memorial that honors the past and feeds the future could not but be mindful of that duality. Now anticipating our 25th anniversary, we are mindful of it, also, in the people who remember, like Augusta, and those who, having been to Kopkind, then return, like our mentors this year, Jennifer Berkshire and Scot Nakagawa; like Jeff Sharlet, who was our guest speakerat a free public event this summer; like Bob Pollin, who since 1999 has come to talk to Kopkind’s journalists and activists on economics. This year he and his wife, Sigrid, brought Nancy Folbre, our new friend, talking about the astonishing, unmeasurable human capabilities in the unpaid work required simply to live, and the implications of this ‘care economy’ for women and girls especially, for families and the unfamilied, for any left political project that cares if people and communities can thrive.
We are mindful of it in the people who have paid the experience forward, and those who will, and all of you reading this who support Kopkind. And those, too, in our orbit who died this year: people who were important to the broad political culture and to early discussions about this project, namely Amber Hollibaugh; and people who, in addition, were closely involved with us for 20 years, namely Kevin Alexander Gray. In an earlier note on Kevin we wrote that, in short, he held to ‘a politics of humanity for humanity’. The phrase, which could be the subtitle to every theme of every Kopkind political camp across the years, is from the Zapatistas. So simple that almost no one can achieve it, though we must try.
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And so to freedom dreams … Recalling that these have been essential to every great movement for a politics of humanity, as Robin D.G. Kelley discussed years ago in a magical talk (with a bat and a broom) in the barn at Kopkind while he was working on his terrific book by that name.
In this time of remembrance and resistance, in this dark, terrible time for the world, we with Kopkind wish you light, courage, hope. On the cusp of our 25th anniversary, we look back on spirits aflame, but ever forward. We will be celebrating Kopkind’s birthday on Andy’s birthday, August 24, at Tree Frog Farm. Stay tuned.
With poetic furor and warm wishes for 2024!
If you are able, please help with a year-end gift. And if you can spare $100, we have a treat: Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World, translated and with commentaries by the Lightning Collective. Allegorical tales with bite and humor and tips on taking the lion down. You can make checks payable to Kopkind and send to 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, Vt. 05301. Or press the Donate button above. If you would like the book for your $100+ donation, please write jwyp2000@gmail.com with your name and mailing address. Thank you!
Kopkind Colony 