10,000 New Social Housing Units – Thanks to Matthew Desmond’s EVICTED

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

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WE ARE OKAY Wins the Michael L. Printz Award

Every January (or sometimes February), the ALA youth media awards are announced at the American Library Association’s Midwinter conference. Among those awards is the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature for YA books published in the previous calendar year. This year’s honorees included heavyweights such as Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down and Angie

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On a “Shared Reading Scheme,” by Dr. Alison Baverstock (Kingston University)

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

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Nashua Public Library Celebrated 15 Years of One City, One Book!

  Outreach Coordinator Carol Luers Eyman says one of the best things about Nashua Reads is reader discovery. “People become open to reading a book that they might not have picked up on their own, and after discussing it with others, often come to appreciate a type of book they don’t ordinarily read.” Isn’t this the

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The Common Reads Guide to 2018’s First Year Experience Conference

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

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Letter from Shawn Achor, Author of BIG POTENTIAL

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

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BROWN GIRL DREAMING in Communities Across America

BROWN GIRL DREAMING is the critically acclaimed and award-winning book by Jacqueline Woodson. It’s a memoir about Jacqueline’s experiences on what is like growing up as a young African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the aftershocks of Jim Crow and her own growing awareness of the Civil Rights Movement. Having won the hearts

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2018 Catalogs for First-Year & Community Reads

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

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