Historian Bryant Simon will discuss his new book which investigates the tragic 1991 chicken processing plant fire in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. This was one of the worst accidents in recent American history, causing twenty-five deaths behind their locked doors. Simon’s interviews with survivors, first responders, workplace safety experts, and local business professionals give a hard-hitting social autopsy of this gruesome event. The book shows in vivid detail how this fire was the nearly inevitable product of what we eat, the rush for deregulation and the even larger American obsession and devotion to the “values of cheap,” values that we can’t seem to shake in the "Wal-Mart world” of today.

Red Emma's is a worker cooperative and family of projects dedicated to autonomy, sustainability, participatory democracy, and solidarity. Since 2004, their space has been a grassroots answer to the collapse of civic infrastructure, a radical gathering place and experiment in self-organized education, all made possible by a horizontally organized collective of folks who own the underlying business cooperatively.