This year’s free May Day book is A Message from Home, by virtuoso Miami street photographer Terence C. Price II. It’s a 6.75 x 8.75 inch, 160-page sewn hardback, with an introduction by Zoé Samudzi entitled “Against the Black Sentimental.” We don’t seek to craft an ode to spectacular greatness or inaccessible performances of “excellence,”…

The sixth free May Day book, published May 1, 2017 in an edition of 1,000 copies, was a tête-bêche featuring Assata Shakur’s “Women in Prison: How It Is with Us” and Emma Goldman’s “The Assassination of McKinley.” Download the Assata Shakur half here, or the Emma Goldman half here.

Now available in digital form is 2015’s free May Day book, The Prison Dictionary. It was written by people incarcerated at ERDCC in Bonne Terre, Missouri. From the Introduction: The question remains: Why a “prison dictionary”? Put simply, we feel that the uncommon grouping of people of various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds within the prison…

Now available in digital form is 2016’s free May Day book, Premature Death. It features four essays—by Third Coast Conspiracy, Civil Rights Congress, James Boggs, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore—which deal with the concept of “premature death” as that to which white supremacy/racial capitalism expose Black people in America daily. Download it here.

This year’s free May Day book is a compilation entitled Cherish x Abolish. It’s a 6 x 8.5-inch, 256-page paperback featuring Ruth Wilson Gilmore, bell hooks, Dev Hynes, Gilles Bertin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Toni Morrison, Zoé Samudzi, Jean Weir, Willem Van Spronsen, Michael Kimble, EZLN, Black Panther Party, Jean Genet, George Jackson, Kanno Sugako, Marilyn Buck,…

2019’s free May Day book was The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner by Saidiya Hartman, an 80-page sewn paperback, edited and designed by Crisis in collaboration with the author, and published in an edition of 1000 copies. It was available for free at Bookbound Bookstore, For Keeps Books, Hasta Muerte, Interference…