Berry, Theodorea Regina, and Nathalie Mizelle, ed. From Oppression to Grace: Women of Color and Their Dilemmas within the Academy. Herndon: Stylus Publishing, 2011. eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]Abstract

"This book gives voice to the experiences of women of color–women of African, Native American, Latina, East Indian, Korean and Japanese descent–as students pursuing terminal degrees and as faculty members navigating the Academy, grappling with the dilemmas encountered by others and themselves as they exist at the intersections of their work and identities. This book uses critical race feminism (CRF) to place women of color in the center, rather than the margins, of the discussion, theorizing, research and praxis of their lives as they co-exist in the dominant culture. The first part of the book addresses the issues faced on the way to achieving a terminal degree: the struggles encountered and the lessons learned along the way. Part Two, "Pride and Prejudice: Finding Your Place After the Degree" describes the complexity of lives of women with multiple identities as scholars with family, friends, and lives at home and at work. The book concludes with the voices of senior faculty sharing their journeys and their paths to growth as scholars and individuals."



Brooms, Derrick R. Being Black, Being Male on Campus: Understanding and Confronting Black Male Collegiate Experiences. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017. eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]Abstract

"This work marks a radical shift away from the pervasive focus on the challenges that Black male students face and the deficit rhetoric that often limits perspectives about them. Instead, Derrick R. Brooms offers reflective counter-narratives of success. He uses in-depth interviews to investigate the collegiate experiences of Black male students at historically White institutions. Framed through Critical Race Theory and Blackmaleness, the study provides new analysis on the utility and importance of Black Male Initiatives (BMIs). This work explores Black men's perceptions, identity constructions, and ambitions, while it speaks meaningfully to how race and gender intersect as they influence students' experiences." -- Publisher's description.



Coleman, Wanda. The World Falls Away. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]Abstract

"Wanda Coleman creates the kind of poetry that excites and ignites those who hate poetry, refreshes it for those who are bored by it, and inspires those who want to write it."



Hārithī, Jūkhah, and Marilyn Booth. Celestial Bodies: A Novel. New York: Catapult, 2019. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool ... against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present"– provided by publisher.



Lee, Min Jin. Pachinko. First trade paperback edition. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2018. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"A new tour de force from the bestselling author of Free Food for Millionaires, for readers of The Kite Runner and Cutting for Stone. PACHINKO follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity"– provided by publisher.



Low, Trisha. Socialist Realism. Minneapolis, Brookyln: Coffee House Press, 2019. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"As she recovers from a breakup with a lover who had meant everything to her, Trisha Low grapples with the meaning of everything, in memoir rich with theory and digression, but also in stark, gorgeous imagery and memorable, epigrammatic insight. Low, a young queer woman from a Singaporean family, must travel between the American coasts and experience debasement both routine -- in the form of sexist, racist world around her -- and extraordinary -- in the form of (for example) an S&M waterboarding workshop -- in order to come to terms with the end of her relationship and the beginning of the next chapter of her adult life"-- Provided by publisher.



McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Thick: And Other Essays. New York ; London: The New Press, 2019. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"In these eight ... explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and ... author of Lower Ed--embraces her ... role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society"--Dust jacket flap.



Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Fourth edition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, this collection expores, as coeditor Cherrie Moraga writes, 'the complex confluence of identities–race, class, gender, sexuality–systemic to women of color oppression and liberation." - back cover.



Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press feminist series. Trumansburg, N.Y. Crossing Press, 1984. eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]Abstract

"The leader of contemporary feminist theory discusses such issues as racism, self-acceptance, and mother- and woman-hood."



Lorde, Audre. Zami ; Sister outsider ; Undersong. Triangle classics. New York: Book of the Month Club, 1993. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a 1982 biomythography by American poet Audre Lorde. It started a new genre that the author calls biomythography, which combines history, biography, and myth. " - Wikipedia.

"Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is a collection of essential essays and speeches written by Audre Lorde, a writer who focuses on the particulars of her identity: Black woman, lesbian, poet, activist, cancer survivor, mother, and feminist." - Wikipedia.

"This volume [Undersong] contains a thorough revision of the author's early poems, 1950-1979, along with nine previously unpublished poems from that period, and an essay describing the revision process. Readers new to Lorde's work will meet here a major American poet whose concerns are international, and whose words have left their mark on many lives. Readers of "The Black Unicorn", "Sister Outsider", "The Cancer Journals", "A Burst of Light", and "Our Dead Behind Us", and the thousands who have attended her poetry readings and speeches, will recognize in this book the roots and the growing-points of a transformative writer. Never has a poet left so clear and conscious a track of artistic choices made in the trajectory of a life. Far from rewriting old poems to fit a changes historical moment, she has finely rehoned formal elements to illuminate the original poems. Throughout, Lorde's lifelong themes of love and anger, family politics, sexuality, and the body of the city can be seen gathering in power and clarity." - Google Books.



Willis, Morgan Mann, ed. Outside the XY: A Bklyn Boihood Anthology. Riverdale, NY: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

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.



Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. New York: Harper, 2017. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"Roxane Gay addresses the experience of living in a body that she calls 'wildly undisciplined.' She casts an insightful and critical eye over her childhood, teens, and twenties -- including the devastating act of violence that was a turning point at age 12 -- and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life. With candor, vulnerability, and authority, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen."



Lane, Cassandra. We Are Bridges: A Memoir. New York: Feminist Press, 2021. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

View eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]

"Cassandra Lane's debut memoir WE ARE BRIDGES follows her late entry into pregnancy and motherhood. As she prepares to give birth, she traces the history of her Black American family in the early twentieth-century rural South, including the lynching of her great-grandfather, Burt Bridges, and the pregnancy of her great-grandmother, Mary. With almost no physical record of her ancestors, Cassandra crafts a narrative of familial love and loss to pass on to her child, rescuing the story of her family from erasure"-- Provided by publisher.



Minh-Ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

View eBook at Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]

"Woman, Native, Other is located at the junction of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in publishing the boundaries of these disciplines further ... In this first full-length study, Trinh Minh-ha examines post-colonial processes of displacement -- cultural hybridization and decentered realities, fragmented selves and multiple identities, marginal voices and languages of rupture. Working at the intersection of several fields -- women's studies, anthropology, critical cultural studies, literary criticism, and feminist theory, she juxtaposes numerous prevailing contemporary discourses in a form that questions the (male-is-norm) literary and theoretical establishment."--Back cover.



Mock, Janet. Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More. New York: Atria Books, 2014. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

View eBook at Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]

"In a landmark book, an extraordinary young woman recounts her coming-of-age as a transgender teen--a deeply personal and empowering portrait of self-revelation, adversity, and heroism. In 2011, Marie Claire magazine published a profile of Janet Mock in which she publicly stepped forward for the first time as a trans woman. Since then, Mock has gone from covering the red carpet for People.com to advocating for all those who live within the shadows of society. Redefining Realness offers a bold new perspective on being young, multiracial, economically challenged, and transgender in America. Welcomed into the world as her parents' firstborn son, Mock set out early on to be her own person--no simple feat for a young person like herself. She struggled as the smart, determined child in a deeply loving, yet ill-equipped family that lacked money, education, and resources. Mock had to navigate her way through her teen years without parental guidance but luckily with a few close friends and mentors she overcame extremely daunting hurdles. This powerful memoir follows Mock's quest for identity, from her early gender conviction to a turbulent adolescence in Honolulu that found her transitioning through the halls of her school, self-medicating with hormones at fifteen, and flying across the world for sex reassignment surgery at just eighteen. Ever resilient, Mock emerged with a scholarship to college and moved to New York City, where she earned her masters degree, basked in the success of an enviable career, and told no one about her past. It wasn't until Mock fell for a man who called her the woman of his dreams that she felt ready to finally tell her story, becoming a fierce advocate for girls like herself. A profound statement of affirmation from a courageous woman, Redefining Realness shows as never before what it means to be a woman today and how to be yourself when you don't fit the mold created for you"-- Provided by publisher.



Oluo, Ijeoma. Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. New York: Seal Press, 2020. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

View eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]

"In her new book, rather than tear down the statues of certain white men, Ijeoma Oluo casts her eye on the long view of a nation that, as a whole, has built a dominant identity for white men. Her book challenges what we value most in America, during a tumultuous time of upheaval as we painfully strive toward a more perfect union. With her signature sharp wit, Oluo exposes how white male identity not only blatantly marks our divided culture today, from presidential politics to popular culture, but it is insidiously embedded even in the history of apparent progress, from women entering the workforce, to rising access to higher education, to the work of white civil rights advocates and male feminists. Oluo relates the glorification of White male aggression behind Western Expansion, the disdain of women workers strengthening the Great Depression, the fear of racial integration driving the Great Migration, and more examples of how White male America was forged and reinforced-at a devastating cost. Far from arguing that all white men are mediocre, Oluo instead challenges a national narrative that for generations has defined success exclusively around white men. Status for white men is granted only in relation to others, and is separated from actual achievement. This is not a benign mediocrity; it is brutal for everyone who is erased. Deeply researched, passionate, and revelatory, Oluo's Mediocre argues that if we wish to move beyond the rancorous politics where only white men are created equal, if we wish to write better stories for the next generation of Americans, we first need upend everything we thought we knew about our founding stories"–



Salman, Ayser. The Wrong End of the Table: A Mostly Comic Memoir of a Muslim Arab American Woman Just Trying to Fit in. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2019. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"You know that feeling of being at the wrong end of the table? Like you’re at a party but all the good stuff is happening out of earshot (#FOMO)? That’s life—especially for an immigrant.

What happens when a shy, awkward Arab girl with a weird name and an unfortunate propensity toward facial hair is uprooted from her comfortable (albeit fascist-regimed) homeland of Iraq and thrust into the cold, alien town of Columbus, Ohio—with its Egg McMuffins, Barbie dolls, and kids playing doctor everywhere you turned?

This is Ayser Salman’s story. First comes Emigration, then Naturalization, and finally Assimilation—trying to fit in among her blonde-haired, blue-eyed counterparts, and always feeling left out. On her journey to Americanhood, Ayser sees more naked butts at pre-kindergarten daycare that she would like, breaks one of her parents’ rules (“Thou shalt not participate as an actor in the school musical where a male cast member rests his head in thy lap”), and other things good Muslim Arab girls are not supposed to do. And, after the 9/11 attacks, she experiences the isolation of being a Muslim in her own country. It takes hours of therapy, fifty-five rounds of electrolysis, and some ill-advised romantic dalliances for Ayser to grow into a modern Arab American woman who embraces her cultural differences.

Part memoir and part how-not-to guide, The Wrong End of the Table is everything you wanted to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as “Tattoos and Other National Security Risks,” “You Can’t Blame Everything on Your Period; Sometimes You’re Going to Be a Crazy Bitch: and Other Advice from Mom,” and even an open letter to Trump. This is the story of every American outsider on a path to find themselves in a country of beautiful diversity." --Publisher description.



Straight, Susan. In the Country of Women: A Memoir. New York: Catapult, 2019. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight--and eventually her three daughters--heard for decades the stories of Dwayne's female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight's mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan's family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward--from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan--those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, "The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival." In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women." -- from Jacket.



Byrd, W. Carson, Rachelle J. Brunn-Bevel, and Sarah M. Ovink, ed. Intersectionality and Higher Education: Identity and Inequality on College Campuses. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

View eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]

"Though colleges and universities are arguably paying more attention to diversity and inclusion than ever before, to what extent do their efforts result in more socially just campuses? This book examines how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, and other identities connect to produce intersected campus experiences"-- Provided by publisher.



Burke, Tarana. Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement. First edition. New York, NY: Flatiron Books, 2021. Book @ Harvard LibraryAbstract

"From the founder and activist behind one of the largest movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the "me too" movement, Tarana Burke debuts a powerful memoir about her own journey to saying those two simple yet infinitely powerful words-me too-and how she brought empathy back to an entire generation in one of the largest cultural events in American history. Tarana didn't always have the courage to say "me too." As a child, she reeled from her sexual assault, believing she was responsible. Unable to confess what she thought of as her own sins for fear of shattering her family, her soul split in two. One side was the bright, intellectually curious third generation Bronxite steeped in Black literature and power, and the other was the bad, shame ridden girl who thought of herself as a vile rule breaker, not of a victim. She tucked one away, hidden behind a wall of pain and anger, which seemed to work...until it didn't. Tarana fought to reunite her fractured soul, through organizing, pursuing justice, and finding community. In her debut memoir she shares her extensive work supporting and empowering Black and brown girls, and the devastating realization that to truly help these girls she needed to help that scared, ashamed child still in her soul. She needed to stop running and confront what had happened to her, for Heaven and Diamond and the countless other young Black women for whom she cared. They gave her the courage to embrace her power. A power which in turn she shared with the entire world. Through these young Black and brown women, Tarana found that we can only offer empathy to others if we first offer it to ourselves. Unbound is the story of an inimitable woman's inner strength and perseverance, all in pursuit of bringing healing to her community and the world around her, but it is also a story of possibility, of empathy, of power, and of the leader we all have inside ourselves. In sharing her path toward healing and saying "me too," Tarana reaches out a hand to help us all on our own journeys"-- Provided by publisher.

Pages