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

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

  The New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME), New York Magazine and Vulture have announced the return of “One Book, One New York,” the exciting city-wide initiative that brings book-loving New Yorkers together to read the same book at the same time.     Throughout the month of April, New Yorkers

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

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

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

Popular Community Reads Pick Hits the Big Screen There’s never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. Each and every morning, A wakes up in a different body and lives a different life. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached.

How to Use Wonder Beyond “Choose Kind” by L. Bruce Coffey Jr., Director of Programs at Read to Them®   At Read to Them, our mission is to help entire school communities read, explore, and share rich children’s novels. For the last six years, R. J. Palacio’s Wonder has been a very special title in

  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

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

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