What is the Liberation Live! book garden?

The Liberation Live! Book Garden is a grassroots book club responding to the violence of prisoner transfers that interrupt students' higher educational journeys. 

We began with the intention to focus our service toward college students who've been transferred to other facilities while they are actively enrolled in higher educational programs. The garden immediately grew when those student expressed a desire to extend this LLBG invitation to many more hopeful community members both inside and out.

Our mission is to continue to grow, in service, and in spirit, as we acknowledge these injustices by sending reading material to individuals whose growth we will not allow the system to stump. 

The Liberation Live! Book Garden believes that reading is the root, the foundation, and that people need air, water, the sun, (a book!), a community to grow with same as all living organisms, as we ascend from the ground and into the world with our intellectual limbs intact.

current read: imagination

“A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.

Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable―but all emerged from the human imagination.

The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: ‘Dream a little before you think.’”