In October 2024, around 1,000 writers and book workers signed an open letter boycotting Israeli literary and cultural institutions that are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, and/or have not recognized those rights publicly. Within a week, more than 5,500 more writers and book workers joined them in taking this position.

Similar letters refusing complicity have emerged across cultural industries, signaling the clarity with which people see the material and psychological connections between art and politics. But little has been done to further organize this refusal, as we approach the third year of genocide in Palestine. We want to focus on the literary industry and materially map its complicity with genocide. We want to get down to the granular: the material workings of refusal, its contradictions, and the new possibilities, directions, and direct actions that might emerge by working through—and against—those contradictions.

We’ll hear from a number of writers and book workers including Aria Aber, Hannah Black, Benjamin Krusling, Abdeljawad Omar, and more. Organized in collaboration with The Poetry Project.