Board of Advisors
Greg Ruggiero is an editor, publisher and activist.
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 Clarence Lusane, Angela Y. Davis, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Ralph Nader, The Dalai Lama, and Subcomandante Marcos.
Ruggiero published the Open Media series independently for several years before bringing the imprint to Seven Stories Press in 1997. He worked as senior editor with Seven Stories Press from 1997 to 2005. In 2006 he joined City Lights Books where he has been working as an editor since 2006.
In 1996, Ruggiero began working with an underground 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 sabbatical 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 ongoing efforts of the Prometheus Radio Project.
Ruggiero travels often to Chiapas, Mexico, home of the indigenous Zapatista movement and communities of resistance. Since 1999 he has been working with those communities to help produce a network of indigenous controlled, low-power FM stations as well as numerous books, pamphlets and audio projects by and about the movement. After celebrating New Year’s Eve, 1999, in a Zapatista community, Ruggiero was detained and interrogated by Mexican authorities and given one week to leave the country.
In November 1999, Ruggiero traveled 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 of Independent Media Centers.Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in February 2002 Ruggiero won a First Amendment victory in Federal District Court. The case, Ruggiero vs the FCC proved that the U.S. government’s 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.
Ruggiero authored Microradio and Democracy, Low Power to The People and has co-edited several books, including The Speed of Dreams, Selected Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (with Canek Peña-Vargas, City Lights Books, 2007) Critical Mass, Voices for a Nuclear Free Future (with Start Sahulka, Open Media, 1996), The New American Crisis: Radical Analysis of the Problems Facing America Today (with Start Sahulka, New Press 1995), Open Fire (with Stuart Sahulka, New Press 1993).
Among the most recent titles in Ruggiero’s Open Media Series are a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and The Black History of the White House, which was the subject of a Black History Month celebration at the White House in February 2011.
