Left: Robin Broad; right: John Cavanagh   In the early 2000s, many people in El Salvador were at first excited by the prospect of jobs, progress, and prosperity that the Pacific Rim mining company promised. However, farmer Vidalina Morales, brothers Marcelo and Miguel Rivera, and others soon discovered that the river system supplying water to

Kabul-born novelist Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, is known for his evocative storytelling deeply rooted in Afghanistan’s history and culture. Like so many of us, he watched Afghanistan fall to the Taliban with profound sadness. In the wake of these events, Penguin Random House has updated the educator’s guides for Hosseini’s

U.S. News & World Report, which publishes the most widely quoted annual set of rankings for American colleges and universities, recently shared their list of “10 Books to Read Before College.” Describing these books as “assigned texts [that] are regularly used in freshman-level classes and offer students a chance to come together to discuss a

Research shows the benefits incoming students glean from participating in a common academic experience as they join a new campus community (Hunter, 2006; Mintz, 2019). These findings have led many institutions to develop Common Reading programs for new members of their campus communities. These programs, centered around a group of faculty, staff, and students selecting

Astronaut Dr. Kathryn Sullivan—author of Handprints on Hubble: An Astronaut’s Story of Invention from the MIT Press—has recently added three new accolades to the long list of accomplishments she has earned over the course of her career as scientist and explorer. With her visit this past June to the Challenger Deep at the base of the Mariana Trench, Dr.

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her award-winning novel Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered story about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.   Transcendent Kingdom Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 40th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 15-19, 2021 Click Here to RSVP PRH virtual events are open only to registered FYE® conference attendees. To register for the conference, click here. Once registered for the conference, be sure to sign up for each event that you plan to attend in advance to receive login

 Penguin Random House Author Events at the 39th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference Washington, D.C., February 21-24, 2020 Click Here to RSVP Interested in hosting one of these authors at your school? Click their name below to learn more! Ibram X. Kendi Jennifer L. Eberhardt Nic Stone Bina Venkataraman Bren Smith

By the time he was twenty-seven, Kwame Onwuachi had competed on Top Chef, cooked at the White House, and opened and closed one of the most talked about restaurants in America. Despite his young age, his success wasn’t won overnight: working in Manhattan, he was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the world of

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

The following letter was contributed by Christian Coleman, Digital Marketing Associate at Beacon Press.  We live in a time where a president makes barefaced remarks in speeches that African Americans and Latinx people are prone to violence and corruption. His statements, obviously, pay no respect to the centuries-long history of African Americans and Latinx people organizing together

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