About this Event
If you would prefer to buy your ticket by phone, you may call Wellesley Books at 781-431-1160.
About ticketing:
- Admission to the event is $5.
- To purchase the book with your admission, choose Admission + Book and we will waive your admission fee.
- If you decide to purchase the book at the event, we will discount your book purchase by $5.
Please note that you must purchase your copy of the book from Wellesley Books in order to have the author sign it at the event.
Please also note that we cannot issue ticket refunds within 48 hours of the event.
ABOUT BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON
The early days and inexorable rise of the young Bernie Sanders, the one-of-a-kind visionary who changed American politics forever, told by a son of the People’s Republic of Burlington, Vermont
In this symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician, Dan Chiasson, a Burlington native who had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders’s development, reconstructs the rise of this American icon. With in-depth reporting and remarkable remembered scenes, he tracks a faint political signal that traveled from the Vermont communes, hard-luck neighborhoods, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the Town Meetings and ballot boxes of his home state, and finally to Washington D.C., to transform our national political landscape.
Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn’t changed to this day, managed to build a coalition in a world of disparate types: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose great grandparents had worked in the mills (Dan’s own); the puppeteers and hippies and NYC transplants looking for land and “authenticity” in Vermont; the developers involved in the era’s urban-renewal schemes; the corrupt old-school Dems at their table in the local dive; and even Ben and Jerry who became Ben and Jerry’s right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan “Burlington is not for sale,” to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, one who got the streets paved but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan.
In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground and the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, this people’s epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee, one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, forging alliances with all comers, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.
ABOUT THE DAN CHIASSON
Dan Chiasson is the author of five books of poetry, including Bicentennial (2014) and The Math Campers (2020), and a book of literary criticism.
A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Chiasson is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Wellesley College.
A native of Burlington, VT, his latest book is Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician(Knopf 2025).
ABOUT WE REFUSE
An “unsparing, erudite, and incisive” (Jelani Cobb, staff writer, The New Yorker) reframing of the past and present of Black resistance—both nonviolent and violent—to white supremacy
* Named a Best Book of 2024 by: Smithsonian; Kirkus; Chicago Review of Books; Emancipator *
Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson looks beyond this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.
The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people for centuries. But force is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.
ABOUT KELLIE CARTER JACKSON
Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen ‘68 Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the Chair of the Africana Studies Department Wellesley College. She is the award winning author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance and the award winning book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, CNN, The Nation, and a host of other outlets. She has been featured in numerous documentaries for Netflix, PBS, MSNBC, and AppleTV. She co-hosts the podcast, “This Day (A History Show)” with Jody Avirgan and Nicole Hemmer.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Wellesley Books, 82 Central Street, Wellesley, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 40.04
