Eliot Asinof

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

Selected as one of baseball literature's Golden Dozen by Roger Kahn, Man on Spikes is an uncompromisingly realistic novel about a baseball player who struggles through sixteen years of personal crises and professional ordeals before finally appearing in a major league game. In a preface to this new edition, Eliot Asinof reveals the long-suffering ballplayer and friend upon which the novel is based.

Craig Badiali and Joan Fox, two popular high school juniors, committed suicide in 1969 as a protest to the Vietnam War. Their families were devastated and the town was shocked. Much was made of the fact that Craig and Joan were "normal" teenagers, not "hippies"; therefore why would they do such a terrible thing? The letters they left at the scene for their friends were never delivered. The high school made no attempt to provide grief counseling for the students. Craig's older brother asked author Eliot Asinof to write about the tragedy; this book is the result.