On the tenth anniversary of her influential essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit comes to New York to read from the essay and discuss the current feminist upheavals and the evolution of a newly energized and transformative movement with writers Aruna d’Souza, Mona Eltahawy, and Marina Sitrin.

The event is free, but reservations are required.

As she writes in the essay, "Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about... Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, and Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.

Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, food, and culture; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; how museums shape our views of each other and the world; and books. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, as well as in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Momus, and Art Practical.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues and global feminism. She is based in Cairo and New York City. She is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, released April 2015, and is a contributor to the New York Times opinion pages. Her commentaries have appeared in several other publications and she is a regular guest analyst on various television and radio shows.

Marina Sitrin is a writer, lawyer, teacher, organizer, militant, and dreamer. She is the editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism & Autonomy in Argentina. Marina’s work has been published in The International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Znet, Yes! Magazine, Tidal, The Nation, Dissent!, Upping the Anti, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, AlterNet, and Prensa Latina, among others. She has a JD in International Womens’ Human Rights from CUNY Law School and a PhD in Global Sociology from Stony Brook University.

Sponsored by Cooper Union, Haymarket Books, and Strand Book Store

Author book-signing to follow. Strand Books will be onsite with books available for purchase