Dimensions: 5.5 X 8.5," 94 pages
Materials: Softcover book
Carlos Cortez
Beloved and inspiring Chicago artist and poet Carlos Cortez (1923-2005) was president of Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company for almost 20 years, a longtime labor activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1947 until his death, co-founder of the first Mexican-American arts organization in Illinois, Movimiento Artistico Chicano (MARCH), and a conscientious objector who was imprisoned for his beliefs. Cortez drew artistic inspiration from German Expressionists, Aztec iconography, and Mexican artists including Diego Rivera and revolutionary printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada.
Charles H. Kerr Publishing
(South Chicago)
Founded by Charles Hope Kerr, a son of abolitionists, in 1886, Charles H. Kerr Publishing is the oldest continuously running radical publisher in the US, offering "subversive literature for the whole family." Close to the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, Kerr brought out many Marxist classics, including the first complete English edition of Capital (1906–1909), as well as works by anarchist Peter Kropotkin, feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, Irish revolutionist James Connolly, animal rights crusader J. Howard Moore, such noted U.S. socialists as Eugene V. Debs, “Mother” Jones, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Gustavus Myers, Carl Sandburg, William D. Haywood, Mary E. Marcy—whose Shop Talks on Economics (1911) sold over two million copies—and, more recently, Staughton Lynd, C. L. R. James, and Carlos Cortez.