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Greg Ruggiero Editor of The City Lights Open Media Series Since cofounding the Open Media Series in 1991, Ruggiero has published some of the most outspoken scholars, social justice advocates, and dissidents of our time, including Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Allen Ginsberg, Arundhati Roy, Ralph Nader, Barbara Olshansky, The Dalai Lama, Vladimir Chernousenko, Cindy Sheehan, Manning Marable, and Subcomandante Marcos. Ruggiero published the Open Media series independently for several years from Westfield, New Jersey with his friend Stuart Sahulka before bringing the imprint to Seven Stories Press in 1997. Ruggiero worked as senior editor with Seven Stories Press from 1997 to 2005 during which time he publishied such critically accalimed and bestselling titles as 9-11 by Noam Chomsky, Silencing Political Dissent by Nancy Chang, Israel/ Palestine by Tanya Reinhart, and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis. |
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In 1996, Ruggiero began working with "Steal This Radio, 88.7FM," an unlicensed FM radio station on New York City's Lower East Side where for two years he hosted a weekly show using the on-air name of "DJ Thomas Paine." Under a MacArthur grant received by the National Lawyers Guild in 1999, he took a three-month sabattical from publishing to work as a national organizer for The Micropower Radio Coalition, an organization founded to end the government ban on low-power community radio. That organization's mission and purpose continues to this day through the brilliant efforts of the Prometheus Radio Project.
Ruggiero travels often to Chiapas, Mexico. In 1999 he began working with Juana Ponce de Leon to research and edit the book, Our Word is Our Weapon. During a trip to Chiapas in January 2000, Ruggiero was forced by the Mexican government to leave Mexico due to alleged affiliation with the Zapatista communities. In November 1999, Ruggiero travelled to Seattle for the historic anti-WTO protests, and while there worked with friends on the first of what has since become a global network ofÊ Independent Media Centers. Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in February 2002 Greg won a First Amendment victory in Federal District Court . The case, Ruggiero vs the FCC proved that the U.S. government'sÊ lifetime prohibition against individuals who had engaged in civil disobedience from applying for a low-power FM license was unconstitutional. The victory was later overturned by an en banc decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected to hear the case. |
