Winter Reads on Resistance & Care

Herbalism and State Violence (2024)

Herbalism and State Violence examines how plant medicines can be a tool for solidarity and resistance; they can guide us through survival and help us recover from trauma. Nicole Rose explores the connections between herbalism and struggles for liberation. Rooted in lived experience and abolitionist analysis, this work invites herbalists to confront the ways state violence shapes access to healing, criminalizes traditional knowledge, and targets marginalized bodies. Through recipes, remedies, and stories from the herbal frontlines, she invites us to connect with our allies in struggle - the plants - to rest, to heal, and to continue the fight. This guide is a crucial resource for herbalists seeking to position their practice within the context of healing justice, community care, and liberation, rather than punishment. 

Matriarchy (2025)

Matriarchy by Briana Muñoz is a ceremonial poetry collection rooted in Chicanx and Indigenous matriarchal wisdom, where motherhood, resistance, and ancestral memory intertwine. Moving between intimacy and insurgency, the poems reclaim the maternal as a political force capable of protecting life, confronting state violence, and imagining liberation. This is poetry as ritual, testimony, and spell-work. Grounded in lived experience and collective history, Muñoz’s work bridges the domestic and the revolutionary, nursing bodies alongside protest lines, desire alongside survival. Her poems honor matriarchy not as biology alone, but as a cosmology of care, protection, and refusal, offering readers a language for healing that is rooted in land, lineage, and ongoing struggle.

The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience (2025)

The Eyes of Gaza by Plestia Alaqad is a series of diary entries written in the weeks following October 7. Raw, heartbreaking, and unbelievably real. Forced to flee from neighborhood to neighborhood and hospital to hospital, she records what she witnesses: the destruction of homes, relentless bombardment, and the unbearable weight of loss. But just as powerfully, she captures the courage, tenderness, and generosity of her people, memorizing faces so they won’t be forgotten, a devastating testimony and a tribute to Gaza’s enduring spirit.

The Great Resistance: The 400 Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas (2026)

The Great Resistance charts four centuries of organized resistance to slavery across the Americas, centering the leadership, strategies, and endurance of enslaved and formerly enslaved peoples within the Atlantic world. Moving beyond narratives of abolition led by states or institutions, the book foregrounds rebellions, maroon communities, legal challenges, and everyday acts of refusal that dismantled slavery from below. This political history offers essential context for readers engaged in decolonial scholarship, abolitionist thought, and the long struggle against racialized state violence.

The Land In Our Bones (2025)

The Land in Our Bones explores ancestral wisdom as a living practice, tracing how herbal medicine, land relationship, and cultural memory are carried through the body across generations. Rooted in Indigenous and diasporic traditions, this nonfiction work centers plant knowledge as both a healing practice and an act of resistance in the face of displacement, extraction, and state violence. This book speaks to herbalists, healers, and community caretakers seeking to reconnect land-based medicine with lineage, responsibility, and collective care.