Steve Fiffer on The Moment: Changemakers on Why and How They Joined the Fight for Social Justice

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

The Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and Prince George’s County Memorial Library System host a book launch for Steve Fiffer and his new book The Moment: Changemakers on How and Why They Joined the Fight for Social Justice. Joining Mr. Fiffer in conversation will be one of the featured changemakers, Ashley M. Jones, Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama.

They are as diverse as America. Young and old. Of color and white. Urban and rural. Immigrants and native born. They are students and teachers. Athletes and artists. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, farmers, architects, novelists, and more. Names familiar and unfamiliar. Superheroes, figuratively—and in one case, real! They have founded major corporations and grassroots organizations or struck out on their own.

But as diverse a lot as they may be, the people who tell their stories on these pages share one thing in common. Each is committed to fighting inequality and injustice. Each, too, can pinpoint a moment when they were moved to action, when it became impossible to sit on the sidelines and just watch: when the teacher uttered racial slurs, when no one in the college club looked like they did, when the city was on the brink of disaster, when the authorities came for their undocumented mother, when they discovered their ancestors enslaved people, when the cop stopped them in their own driveway, when there was no fresh food in their community, when their right to vote was threatened.

In The Moment, New York Times bestselling author Steve Fiffer presents an oral history from today's social justice activists—many of them still under thirty years old—that is pitch perfect for these dissonant times. First-person accounts, that will inspire us to act, offer a blueprint for making change and, perhaps, most importantly, give us hope for the future.

Steve Fiffer is the author of the memoir: Three Quarters, Two Dimes, and a Nickel. Most recently he collaborated with the late civil rights icon, Dr. C. T. Vivian, on his memoir, It's in the Action: Memories of a Nonviolent Warrior. He also collaborated with Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees on two award-winning memoirs, A Season for Justice and Hate on Trial. He is the co-author of Jimmie Lee and James: Two Lives, Two Deaths, and the Movement that Changed America, a Harlem Book Fair nonfiction finalist; and with his wife Sharon wrote 50 Ways to Help Your Community: A Handbook for Change.  Fiffer, a graduate of Yale College and the University of Chicago Law School, is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Other books include Tyrannosaurus Sue and How to Watch Baseball. He currently serves on the advisory board of the Chicago-based Civic Leadership Foundation. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. She was also a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She was an editor of PANK Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her third collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was published in Fall 2021 from Hub City Press. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and she is the 2019 winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Jones is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a 2020 Alabama Author award from the Alabama Library Association. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and her collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Jones is also a member of the Core Faculty at the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.