Rees, Dee. Pariah. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2012. View the FilmAbstract

Alike is a 17-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents and younger sister in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. She has a flair for poetry, and is a good student at her local high school. Alike is quietly but firmly embracing her identity as a lesbian. Wondering how much she can confide in her family, Alike strives to get through adolescence with grace, humor, and tenacity–sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, but always moving forward.



Shakur, Assata, and Angela Davis. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001. View the eBook-Harvard Key RequiredAbstract

Longtime activist, author and political figure Angela Davis brings us this expose of the women's movement in the context of the fight for civil rights and working class issues. She uncovers a side of the fight for suffrage many of us have not heard: the intimate tie between the anti-slavery campaign and the struggle for women's suffrage. She shows how the racist and classist bias of some in the women's movement have divided its own membership.



Rehman, Sabeeha. Threading My Prayer Rug: One Woman's Journey from Pakistani Muslim to American Muslim. First edition. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016. View the BookAbstract

Threading My Prayer Rug is a richly textured reflection on what it is to be a Muslim in America today. Beginning with a sweetly funny, moving account of the author's arranged marriage, the author undercuts stereotypes and offers the refreshing view of an American life through Muslim eyes.



Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. First edition. New York, NY: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016. View the BookAbstract

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.



Willis, Morgan Mann. Outside the Xy: A Bklyn Boihood Anthology. 1st ed. Riverdale, NY: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016. View the BookAbstract

An anthology of more than 50 stories, memoirs, poems, ideas, essays and letters–all examining what it looks like, feels like, and is like to inhabit masculinity outside of cisgender manhood as people of color in the world.



Shukla, Nikesh, and Chimène Suleyman, ed. The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019. View the BookAbstract

Presents essays by first- and second-generation immigrant writers on the realities of immigration, multiculturalism, and marginalization in an increasingly divided America.



Pryal, Katie Rose Guest. Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education. Chapel Hill, NC: Blue Crow Publishing, 2017. View the BookAbstract

The essays in this book cover topics such as disclosure of disabilities, accommodations and accessibility, how to be a good abled friend to a disabled person, the trigger warnings debate, and more. Written for a popular audience, for those with disabilities and for those who want to learn more about living a disabled life, Life of the Mind Interrupted aims to make higher education, and the rest of our society, more humane.



Whitaker, Manya Catrice, and Eric Anthony Grollman, ed. Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics: Bravery, Vulnerability, and Resistance. New York: Routledge, 2019. View the eBookAbstract

This book documents the lived experiences of women of color academics who have leveraged their professional positions to challenge the status quo in their scholarship, teaching, service, activism, and leadership. By presenting reflexive work from various vantage points within and outside of the academy, contributors document the cultivation of mentoring relationships, the use of administrative roles to challenge institutional leadership, and more.



Wang, Esmé Weijun. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019. View the BookAbstract

Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the 'collected schizophrenias' but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang's analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative.



Power, Carla. If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Qurʼan. 1st ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015. View the BookAbstract

If the Oceans Were Ink is Carla Power's story of how she and her longtime friend Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi found a way to confront ugly stereotypes and persistent misperceptions that were cleaving their communities. Their friendship -- between a secular American and a madrasa-trained sheikh -- had always seemed unlikely, but now they were frustrated and bewildered by the battles being fought in their names. Both knew that a close look at the Quran would reveal a faith that preached peace and not mass murder; respect for women and not oppression. And so they embarked on a yearlong journey through the controversial text. A journalist who grew up in the Midwest and the Middle East, Power offers her unique vantage point on the Quran's most provocative verses as she debates with Akram at cafes, family gatherings, and packed lecture halls, conversations filled with both good humor and powerful insights. Their story takes them to madrasas in India and pilgrimage sites in Mecca, as they encounter politicians and jihadis, feminist activists and conservative scholars.



Spencer, Elizabeth. The Voice at the Back Door. Louisiana State University Press, 1994. View the eBook-Harvard Key RequiredAbstract

In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret.

In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice -- one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers -- finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect -- Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.



Yanagihara, Hanya. A Little Life. First Anchor Books Edition. New York: Anchor Books, 2016. View the BookAbstract

A Little Life follows four college classmates-broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara's stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.
Plank, Liz. For the love of men: a new vision for mindful masculinity. First edition. New York: ST. Martin's Press, 2019.
Washuta, Elissa. White magic: essays. Portland, Oregon: Tin House, 2021.Abstract
"Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life-Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham-to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule"–
Washuta, Elissa. My body is a book of rules. First edition. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2014.
Wood, Zachary R. Uncensored: my life and uncomfortable conversations at the intersection of Black and White America. New York, New York: Dutton, 2018.
Westover, Tara. Educated: a memoir. First edition. New York: Random House, 2018.Abstract
"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge would transform her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Tara Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it."–Provided by publisher
Takei, George, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker. They called us enemy. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2019.Abstract
"A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon – and America itself – in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love." –
Shehadeh, Raja. Palestinian walks: forays into a vanishing landscape. 1st ed. New York: Scribner ; Distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: a survivor's tale. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

Pages