What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century. Here, editors Rebecca Gayle Howell & Ashley M. Jones bring together more than one hundred contemporary writers singing out from the corners of the 99 Percent, each telling their own truth of today's economy.
In his final days, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a "multiracial coalition of the working poor." King hoped this coalition would become the next civil rights movement but he was assassinated before he could see it emerge as the Poor People's Campaign, now led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. King's last lesson―about the dangers of dividing working people―inspired the conversation gathered here by Jones and Howell.
Fifty-five years after the assassination of King, What Things Cost collects stories that are honest, provocative, and galvanizing, sharing the hidden costs of labor and laboring in the United States of America. Voices such as Sonia Sanchez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Silas House, Sonia Guiñansaca, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Victoria Chang, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown weave together the living stories of the campaign's broad swath of supporters, creating a literary tapestry that depicts the struggle and solidarity behind the work of building a more just America.
Rebecca Gayle Howell (Kentucky, 1975) is a writer, translator, and editor of place-based literature. Howell’s work has received critical acclaim from such outlets as The Los Angeles Times, Poetry London (U.K.), The Courier-Journal, Asymptote, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Millions, Arts ATL, MINT (India), and The Kenyon Review. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from The Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword INDIES Awards, The Nautilus Awards, The Banipal Prize (U.K.), The Millions, Book Riot, The Rumpus, and Ms. magazine, and both American Purgatory and Render were ...