For this month’s Paseo Artistico, in keeping with the theme “Women Are the Heart of Our Culture” we are featuring Arlene Eisen, whose new book “In The Worldwide Family of Militant Women” was released this year by Iskra Books. Arlene will read from her new book and also be in conversation with Nadya R. Tannous.

Inspired by the Black and Vietnamese liberation movements, Arlene Eisen has been a militant in the struggles against Empire since the 1960’s. She edited The Movement newspaper and was a leading voice in the anti-imperialist women’s movement of the 1970’s. For the next half century, she joined the anti-apartheid movement, the movement for justice in Palestine, including the olive harvest in the West Bank, the struggle for the right to return to New Orleans after Katrina, the movements against U.S. fascist police and their deputized militias and against the holocaust in Gaza-- always standing in solidarity with national liberation struggles both inside and outside the U.S. Empire.

Arlene Eisen is the author of the influential study, Operation Ghetto Storm—the report that first documented and analyzed the extrajudicial killing by police of Black people in the US. Her analysis of the U.S. war on Black people documented, for the first time, that US police and their surrogates kill a Black person every 28 hours. From Chicago to Oakland, from New York to New Orleans, the hashtag #Every28Hours fueled campaigns that challenged police power. The US Human Rights Network presented the report at the 2014 Review of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva. She also wrote, Women of Viet Nam (revised). That book so resonated with popular opinion, that even with no commercial advertising, or social media, it sold more than 50,000 copies in English and editions in Spanish, French, Danish and Farsi were published. Eisen’s Women and Revolution in Viet Nam was the first book to be published in the West about women in Viet Nam after the War. Her book, In the Worldwide Family of Militant Women, a hybrid social history/memoir was released in January 2026. Eisen’s journalism has appeared in Telesur, The Root, Counterpunch, San Francisco Bayview, She produced and hosted Nina Viva, a monthly radio show on KPOO-FM that featured voices of international women analysts. Based in Caracas, she was a staff writer for Venezuelanalysis.com, an independent English-language daily news service. Her latest book “Women Are the Heart of Our Culture” was published this year by Iskra Books.

Nadya R. Tannous, author of the book’s Foreword and other articles.  Nadya is a longtime organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement.The Palestinian Youth Movement is a transnational, independent, grassroots movement of young Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora. PYM plays an active role in their national struggle for the liberation of their homeland and people to end the ongoing Zionist colonization and occupation of their homeland, and genocidal campaign to destroy all Palestinian life. Nadya also has a Master’s degree from Oxford University in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.