About Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case.

On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation's premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.  In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization's one-hundred-year history.

The powerful stories within, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of many books, including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, Pops, and the picture book The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man. He is the editor, with Ayelet Waldman, of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation and Fight of the Century.

Ayelet Waldman is the author of the memoir, A Really Good Day, as well as of novels including Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons, and with Michael Chabon, of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation and Fight of the Century.

Ahilan T. Arulanantham is Senior Counsel at the ACLU of Southern California.  He has successfully litigated a number of significant cases, including Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the first case to establish a federal right to appointed counsel for any group of immigrants,  Jennings v. Rodriguez, which he argued twice before the United States Supreme Court, and, most recently, Ramos v. Nielsen, a challenge to the Trump Administration's plan to end the TPS program for immigrants who have lived here for decades. Ahilan has also testified before the United States Congress on three occasions on immigrants’ rights and national security issues.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. Parker’s work has appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, TIME, Best American Poetry, and Playbill. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Parker is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel, co-curates the Poets with Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico, and collaborates with Angel Nafis as The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.

Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, Ahilan T. Arulanantham, & Morgan Parker discuss "Fight of the Century"