From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Ruth J. Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South

The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to “a mind spread out on the ground.” In this visceral memoir, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced. Elliott’s deeply personal writing details a life

Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.   IN GUAM, even the dead are dying. As I write this, the US

Material World is a celebration of the humans and human networks, the miraculous processes and little-known companies, that combine to turn  raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: from the ground up.   1 Homo Faber This story begins with a bang. An explosion of

Dr. Joy Buolamwini, the self-described “Poet of Code,” goes beyond the news headlines about racism, colorism, and sexism in Big Tech to tell the remarkable story of how she uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—evidence of racial and gender bias in tech—and galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice

After his father’s death, Esau McCaulley went back through his family history, seeking to understand the community that shaped him: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class. With profound honesty

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a poet’s account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family’s escape from genocide. One A Phone Call from Beijing I keep returning to the first day of 2013. That evening, I received an unexpected call from Ilham Tohti, an economics

In Solito, a young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine.   Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the PEN/Open Book Award Finalist for

Two-time world champion debater and former coach of the Harvard debate team, Bo Seo tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion.   1. Topic How to find the debate On a Monday morning in January 2007, a couple of months after my graduation

Called “powerful and provocative” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, White Tears/Brown Scars reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color. Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought

Introduced to American movies and pop music while growing up in Somalia, Abdi Nor Iftin fell in love with the idea of America long before he could find the country on a map. As the Somali Civil War broke out, Abdi grew desensitized to the violence around him: avoiding gunfire during his daily trip to