If you were one of the many in attendance at the First-Year Experience® conference in Atlanta this past  February, you might have joined us at one of our events showcasing authors and books ideal for common reading. If you or your colleagues didn’t make it, or if you would like to watch the talks

Garrard Conley, a survivor of the controversial “ex-gay” therapy movement, describes his traumatic experience as a gay man growing up in the South. In the years following his escape from extreme prejudice, he has learned one important lesson: compassion has the power to heal wounds, but it’s also one of the messiest human emotions.

By Wayne Maines, father of Nicole Maines.  The Maines family is the focus of Amy Ellis Nutt’s Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (Random House, October 2015) Recently I had the opportunity to speak at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Before the lecture I spent an hour walking around their beautiful campus, thinking

By Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, March 2016) I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off