On February 9, 2018, the Penguin Random House First-Year Reading Advisory Board convened for their annual summit the day before The First-Year Experience® Conference exhibit and sessions commenced. The Board members, representing a variety of public and private higher education institutions of varying sizes, came together to exchange ideas, and provide feedback and guidance. Our seven board members, along with staff

We’re pleased to share videos from the First-Year Experience® Conference held in San Antonio, TX this past February. If you weren’t able to join us for our author events at the conference, or would simply like to hear the talks again, please take a moment to view the clips below.   Penguin Random House Author

Tom Barrett, Mayor of Milwaukee, read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which tells the story of eight impoverished families in his city who are threatened with forced eviction. Influenced by this multi-award-winning book, Barrett is launching an ambitious housing project to build or renovate 10,000 housing units in Milwaukee over the next

Did we steal or borrow the idea of common reading? A publisher and long-term believer in the power of the book to connect communities, it was at an academic conference in Boston in 2006 that I spotted a paper on the practice of ‘common reading’. What a great idea I thought, and I pondered long

Heading to the First-Year Experience conference in San Antonio this year? If so, you’re in luck. Now in it’s 37th year, the annual conference provides a dynamic forum for higher-ed pros to share pedagogical experiences, classroom breakthroughs, and ongoing concerns centering around the first year college experience, making it the ideal place to source inspiration

A message from Shawn Achor: My parents are educators of first-year students. My father taught freshman Introduction to Psychology for 39 years at Baylor. My mom taught freshman English for 30 years. And I spent eight years as a first-year proctor at Harvard, where my job was to counsel freshmen students through their transition. Long

RSVP now for the Penguin Random House Author Events at the 2018 First-Year Experience® Conference in San Antonio, TX

We are delighted to present our new First-Year reading catalogs for 2018! From award-winning fiction and memoir to new books about science, technology, history and current events, the titles presented in our college reading catalogs will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages, but also excited for the chance to discuss their reading

The Swedish Academy has announced the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the English author Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”   The newest Literature Laureate mentioned to the BBC that he hoped the Nobel prize would

Dear Readers, When I first met Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, I was 18. She was presented to me in a women’s studies class as a rational, respectable figure: A “proto-feminist” whose revolutionary ideas had included letting women vote (horrors!), get educations (gasp!), and, most controversial of all,

RSVP now for the Penguin Random House Author Events at the 2018 First-Year Experience® Conference in San Antonio, TX

Recognizing the power of literature to promote peace and reconciliation, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction and nonfiction. Inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only international literary peace