About

Cindy Milstein is the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (IAS/AK Press, 2010); the picture-essay collaborative book with Erik Ruin titled Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (PM Press, 2012); and editor of the anthologies Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism (AK Press, 2015); Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief (AK Press, 2017); Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy (AK Press, 2020); and There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists (AK Press, 2021). Cindy has been overly engaged in numerous collective projects aimed at creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education, including currently, the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, and the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and its Anarchist Summer School. Past projects include the decentralized Institute for Anarchist Studies, where Milstein focused on projects such as the Lexicon pamphlet series, IAS/AK Anarchist Interventions book series, Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, and curating anarchist theory tracks at the National Conference on Organized Resistance and Left Forum; Another World Is Possible convergence space at the World Social Forum in Detroit; Defend J20 Resistance; Station 40, an anarchist(ic) home and social center in San Francisco, along with San Francisco Eviction Defense and Coffee Not Cops; Interference Archive in Brooklyn; Occupy Philly; the Don’t Just (Not) Vote campaign; Detroit Eviction Defense; Huron Valley Solidarity and Defense; and Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont. They also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology, and have long been involved in community organizing and social/political movements from below.

Their essays also appear in several anthologies, including We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority, and Globalize Liberation. Cindy is always happy to travel far and wide to do public speaking and popular education around topics related to anarchism (including Jewish, queer, and feminist), direct democracy, grief and mourning, anticapitalism, contemporary culture, and other political interventions, to encourage critical thought and prefigurative politics, and to do indie media as a sort of anarchist political correspondent/commentator, such as spring/summer 2012 during the Quebec student strike in Montreal. They spent late summer 2012 to October 2013 mostly in mid-Michigan, caretaking her two sick and dying parents, who died well on May 16 and October 3, 2013, and again in late 2015, for her chosen second mom; that experience has prompted them to write about love, caretaking and deathwork, loss, dying, and grief as well as caring communities from a politico-personal point of view.

Cindy is always glad for folks to subscribe to their blog. They are also overjoyed to get invites to speak anywhere and everywhere, and can be reached at cbmilstein@yahoo.com.

To order Cindy’s Anarchism and Its Aspirations book, or other titles in the Anarchist Interventions series by the IAS/AK, click here for an honest-to-goodness version of a book that you can hold in your hands: http://www.akpress.org/anarchism-and-its-aspirations.html, or here, for the e-book (still in your hands, but just not as comfy): http://www.akpress.org/anarchismanditsaspirationsebook.html

To get a copy of Cindy’s edited anthology There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists, follow this link: https://www.akpress.org/thereisnothingsowhole.html

To order a copy of Cindy’s edited anthology Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy, head to https://www.akpress.org/deciding-for-ourselves.html

For a copy of Cindy’s edited anthology Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, see https://www.akpress.org/rebellious-mourning.html

To get a copy of Cindy’s collaborative experiment in picture-essays with Erik Ruin, Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, follow this link: https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=412

To order a copy of Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism, edited by Cindy, head over to this link: http://www.akpress.org/takingsides.html.

To download the Lexicon pamphlet series as PDFs, you can can print, assemble, fold, staple, and distro (for free!) far and wide, head over to http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/ak-tactical-media/ias-lexicon-pamphlet-series/

For a pretty copy of Cindy’s zine Mutual Fire Brigade, go to https://www.akpress.org/mutual-fire-brigade.html

Photo at top: Awkward “self-portrait” for upcoming Platform Cooperativism symposium in NYC in November 201; photo at bottom: Cindy (on right side) at Private, Public, Commons Teach-in at the occupation in Philly, October 22, 2011 (photo by Dave Onion).