"By 1968, most Americans felt that the War on Poverty had been lost, cast out to the shadows of the Vietnam War. That same year, the Poor People's Campaign marched on Washington in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination, motivated by King's desire for economic justice. The campaign was a multiracial effort that aimed to alleviate poverty for African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Indigenous people. In 2017, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival was launched with the goal to bring King's "revolution of values" to fruition. In What Things Cost, Ashley M. Jones and Rebecca Gayle Howell present an anthology of contemporary poems that speak to the current state of the labor movement. Designed to be a fundraiser for The Poor People's Campaign, What Things Cost employs the power of verse and storytelling to illuminate the painful difficulties of building a healthy life in modern America. Like the campaign itself, the poems bridge lived experiences of struggle across racial and historical divides. The effect is a folkloric journey through America's contemporary landscape. The common theme of work threads through this rich literary quilt, revising outdated American Dream mythology. Jones and Howell blanket tales of hardship, gratitude, guilt, grievance, and solidarity within this volume, with the goal of creating an economically just country"-- - (Baker & Taylor)

What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century. Here, editors Rebecca Gayle Howell & Ashley M. Jones bring together more than one hundred contemporary writers singing out from the corners of the 99 Percent, each telling their own truth of today's economy.

In his final days, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a "multiracial coalition of the working poor." King hoped this coalition would become the next civil rights movement but he was assassinated before he could see it emerge as the Poor People's Campaign, now led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. King's last lesson—about the dangers of dividing working people—inspired the conversation gathered here by Jones and Howell.

Fifty-five years after the assassination of King, What Things Cost collects stories that are honest, provocative, and galvanizing, sharing the hidden costs of labor and laboring in the United States of America. Voices such as Sonia Sanchez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Silas House, Sonia Guiñansaca, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Victoria Chang, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown weave together the living stories of the campaign's broad swath of supporters, creating a literary tapestry that depicts the struggle and solidarity behind the work of building a more just America.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of American Purgatory and Render /An Apocalypse, and the translator of Amal al-Jubouri's Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from The Nautilus Awards, Best Translated Book Awards, The Weatherford Awards, The Banipal Prize, Book Riot, The Rumpus, Foreword Reviews, Library Journal, and Burnaway, and both American Purgatory and Render were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. Among Howell's awards is the United States Artists Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Sexton Prize, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Howell is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program and the longtime Poetry Editor for The Oxford American, where she and her colleagues received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Her most recent release is A Winter Breviary, written by Howell and composed by Reena Esmail, broadcast in part by the BBC and just published by Oxford University Press. Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of Alabama. She is the author of three poetry collections: Magic City Gospel, dark // thing, and REPARATIONS NOW! (on the longlist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary's College of Maryland. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and she was a guest editor of POETRY magazine in 2021. She teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and in the Low Residency MFA program at Converse University. She co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.