Welcome to Liberating Libraries, a podcast project presented by the Conspiracy of Equality. In this show, we talk about the fiction we’re reading and how it is informing, poking at, inspiring, or enabling our social justice work. We don’t delve deep ‘into the text’, but we use the work of our faves (like Octavia Butler, Marlon James, Zadie Smith, Ursula le Guin, Isabelle Allende…) to work through ideas and imagine the worlds that could be.

This is an amateur effort: the goal is to get us thinking about fiction and the role it can play in building better futures. Often on the left there is a divide between writing that is analytical (and considered valuable to movements) and writing that is narrative or poetic (and considered less valuable). We want to break that divide, to encourage fellow leftists to read fiction not only for pleasure, but also as a source of inspiration and empathy. We want to celebrate the fiction that liberates us, even when it is complicated, and we want to participate in the liberation of creativity.

We’re not professional editors or critics, just people with ideas and a moderately good sense of how to articulate some of them.