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© Cornelia Holden

Mckay Jenkins

McKay Jenkins holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he has also written for Outside, Orion, and many other publications. He is the author of What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World;  Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 (Random House, 2005); The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe (Random House, 2003); The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (Random House, 2000); and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999). He is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader (Vintage, 2000). A winner of the University of Delaware's Excellence in Teaching Award, Jenkins is currently Tilghman Professor of English and a member of the Program in Journalism. He lives in Baltimore with his family.
Food Fight

Books

Food Fight

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 286 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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Register for the 2026 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 45th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 15-18, 2026 Seattle, Washington Hyatt Regency Seattle Click Here to RSVP A complimentary meal and a limited number of books will be available to attendees. Each event will also be followed by an author signing. Interested in hosting one of these authors at

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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