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Read & Learn!
Musselman Library supports the learning of every member of our campus community. As part of our antiracist work, we intentionally collect works about a range of DEI (diversity equity inclusion) subjects and works by authors from marginalized and/or underrepresented groups. We also welcome suggestions for library purchases.
The Library DEIB Committee curates occasional reading lists on a range of topics. All recommended books are in our collection and are available to any student or employee as part of their formal or ongoing education. If you have feedback about titles that are included (or not included), please get in touch.
Our Reading Programs, Resources, and Communities guide may also be of interest.
Image Credit: Ideal Bookshelf 1162: Anti-Racism by Jane Mount
Learn more about the lived experiences of individuals with different visible and invisible disabilities. This book list of 25 titles was originally curated by Kevin Moore in February 2021.
A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience: Disability Visibility brings together the voices of activists, authors, lawyers, politicians, artists, and everyday people whose daily lives are, in the words of playwright Neil Marcus, "an art . . . an ingenious way to live." Activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent, galvanizing collection of personal essays by contemporary disabled writers. Taken together, this anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community
Born with cerebral palsy, Keah Brown's greatest desire used to be normalcy and refuge from the steady stream of self-hate society strengthened inside her. But after years of introspection and reaching out to others in her community, she has reclaimed herself and changed her perspective. With clear, fresh, and light-hearted prose, Brown's essays explore everything from her relationship with her able-bodied identical twin to navigating romance; her deep affinity for all things pop culture--and her disappointment with the media's distorted view of disability; and her declaration of self-love with the viral hashtag #DisabledAndCute.
Over the course of several personal essays, genderqueer activist/writer Eli Clare weaves together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home, all the while providing an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually experience the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance.
In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. She ended up in Toronto, where she was welcomed by a community of queer punks of color offering promises of love and revolution, yet she remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and "dreams her way home."
Claiming Disability is the first comprehensive examination of Disability Studies as a field of inquiry. Disability Studies is not simply about the variations that exist in human behavior, appearance, functioning, sensory acuity, and cognitive processing but the meaning we make of those variations. With vivid imagery and numerous examples, Simi Linton explores the divisions society creates--the normal versus the pathological, the competent citizen versus the ward of the state. Map and manifesto, Claiming Disability overturns medicalized versions of disability and establishes disabled people and their allies as the rightful claimants to this territory.
Learning Sickness is the compelling narrative of Jim Lang's battle with Crohn's Disease. Diagnosed at the age of 26, Jim spent the next five years coming to terms with how to live with a chronic illness. During that time he fathered two children, earned a Ph.D., accepted his first teaching position, and launched a writing career. Jim Lang provides an absolutely unflinching look at the way the disease can penetrate into every aspect of a person's life: physical, emotional, and spiritual.
Robert Murphy uses this narrative to tell his journey through a deteriorating spinal condition leading to paraplegia. He was diagnosed with a tumor extending from his second cervical vertebra to the eighth thoracic vertebra in 1972. Through his narrative he tells his medical history and how the diagnosis of old medicine (late 1920s) knew very little about neurology, and left undetected problems that created a new issue in his 50's. As an anthropology professor at Columbia University, he applies his field to his medical journey. Due to funded research of his medical experiences and conditions, he provides the readers with a description and explanation of what he deals with, plus a constant discussion of future possibility and his mindset throughout.
Girma grew up with her family in the Eritrean city of Asmara during Eritrea's thirty-year war with Ethiopia. Defining her disability as an opportunity for innovation, she learned non-visual techniques for everything from dancing salsa to handling an electric saw. She developed a text-to-braille communication system that created a new way to connect with people. Pioneering her way through obstacles, Girma graduated from Harvard Law, and now uses her talents to advocate for people with disabilities. This is a testament to her determination to find the keys to connection.
Hailed by The Comics Journal as one of Europe’s most important and innovative comics artists, David B. has created a masterpiece in Epileptic, his stunning and emotionally resonant autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother. Epileptic gathers together and makes available in English for the first time all six volumes of the internationally acclaimed graphic work.
A memoir on the phenomenology of illness, and what it means to live and think while chronically ill.
In her third collection of poems, Jillian Weise delivers a reckoning to the ableism of the Western Canon. These poems investigate and challenge the ways that nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies, from calling out William Carlos Williams to biohacking Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" to chronicling the ongoing headlines of violence against disabled women. Part invective, part love poem, Cyborg Detective holds a magnifying glass to the marginalization and fetishization of disabled people while claiming space and pride for the people who already use technology and cybernetic implants every day.
Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mailroom of a corporate law firm.
This text draws from primary source documents and social histories to tell the experiences of people with disabilities in the U.S.
A memoir of paranoid schizophrenia by an accomplished professor recounts her first symptoms at the age of eight, her efforts to hide the severity of her condition, and the obstacles she has overcome in the course of her treatment and marriage.
Based on the New York Times series, About Us captures the voices of a community that has been stereotyped and misrepresented. The authors in About Us offer intimate stories of how they navigate a world not built for them. The stories here reveal the range of responses, and the variety of consequences, to being labeled as "disabled" by the broader public.
Debut author Hoang's romance novel features two uncommon protagonists: a woman with autism spectrum disorder and a biracial man. Inspired by personal experience, Hoang depicts Stella with empathy and honesty. Readers will find this to be a refreshing take on the classic romance story of an arranged, pragmatic relationship that turns into true love.
This open access book marks the first historical overview of the autism rights branch of the neurodiversity movement, describing the activities and rationales of key leaders in their own words since it organized into a unique community in 1992. These actions have shifted the landscape toward viewing autism in social terms of human rights and identity to accept, rather than as a medical collection of deficits and symptoms to cure.
Disability: The Basics aims to provide readers with an understanding of the lived experiences of disabled people and highlight the continuing gaps and barriers in social responses to the challenge of disability. This book is suitable for lay people, students of disability studies as well as students taking a disability module as part of a wider course within social work, health care, sociology, nursing, policy and media studies.
One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn't built for all of us and of one woman's activism--from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington--Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society.
This fascinating blend of memoir, journalism, and science reveals how much normally functioning people can learn from those with neurological disorders such as depression, multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, and autism.
This book offers an accessibly written introduction to autism that make it an indispensable resource for anyone whose life has been affected--directly or indirectly--by this condition.
From the Periphery consists of more than thirty first-person narratives by activists and everyday people who describe what it's like to be treated differently by society because of their disabilities. Their stories are raw and painful but also surprisingly funny and deeply moving--describing anger, independence, bigotry, solidarity, and love, in the family, at school, and in the workplace.
John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits had earned him the label "social deviant." It was not until he was forty that an insightful therapist told him he had the form of autism called Asperger's syndrome. That understanding transformed the way Robison saw himself--and the world.
Mark Richard suffered from deformed hips at birth and was told he would spend his adult life in a wheelchair. As a young man, defying both his doctors and parents, he set out to experience as much of the world as he could before his hips failed him. While digging irrigation ditches in east Texas, he discovered that a teacher had sent a story of his to the Atlantic, where it was named a winner in the magazine's national fiction contest, launching his career.
James Charlton has produced a ringing indictment of disability oppression, which, he says, is rooted in degradation, dependency, and powerlessness and is experienced in some form by five hundred million persons throughout the world who have physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental disabilities. Nothing About Us Without Us is the first book in the literature on disability to provide a theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism. The book expresses the conviction of people with disabilities that they know what is best for them.
This is a selection of antiracism reading materials from our collection. This book list of 30 titles was curated by Beth Carmichael in February 2021.
Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow Laws, the system that once forced African Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts America, the US criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and an entire segment of the population is deprived of their basic rights. Outside of prisons, a web of laws and regulations discriminates against these wrongly convicted ex-offenders in voting, housing, employment and education.
The author reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter and the other secretly passes for white. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined.
The author's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when her parents told her they named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. She grew up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, and has spent her life navigating America's racial divide. Brown highlights how white middle-class evangelicalism has participated in the rise of racial hostility, and encourages the reader to confront apathy and recognize God's ongoing work in the world.
This is the story of sports post-9/11, once neutral but now embedded with deference toward the military and police, colliding with the political reawakening of the black athlete in post-Ferguson America
Many of us believe in equality, diversity, and inclusion, but how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? Chugh reveals the surprising causes of inequality, and offers practical tools to respectfully and effectively talk politics with family, to be a better colleague to people who don't look like you, and to avoid being a well-intentioned barrier to equality. Being the person we mean to be starts with a look at ourselves
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage, but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, he becomes determined to escape. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind--but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss.
Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility, the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially. It is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively
Fifty years ago, Malcolm X told a white woman who asked what she could do for the cause, 'Nothing.' The author believes he was wrong. Now he responds to that question. If society is to make real racial progress, people must face difficult truths, including being honest about how Black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.
You don't have to be racist to be biased. Unconscious bias can be at work without our realizing it, and even when we genuinely wish to treat all people equally, ingrained stereotypes can infect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. This has an impact on education, employment, housing, and criminal justice. Here, with a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Eberhardt offers us insights into the dilemma and a path forward.
Gifty is a PhD candidate in neuroscience studying reward-seeking behavior and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother was a high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees. But even as she turns to the hard sciences, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith. This is a moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love.
Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger -- these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. This book explores black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images; and looks at how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing.
In this collection of essays, Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement. She argues that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?
Ibram X. Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism.
Heather McGee's specialty is the American economy. As she dug into the subject, from the financial crisis to declining wages to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common problem at the bottom of them all: racism. Racism has costs for white people, too. It's the common denominator in our most vexing public problems, even beyond our economy. It is at the core of the dysfunction of our democracy and even the spiritual and moral crises that grip us.
Many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Physician Jonathan M. Metzl's quest to understand the health implications of "backlash governance" leads him across America's heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates.
This novel creates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world we enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr. (known as Milkman), son of the richest black family in a mid-western town; the day on which the lonely insurance man, Robert Smith, poised in blue silk wings, attempts to fly from a steeple of the hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward.
This book assesses the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. To bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, the author answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans
This book argues that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. The author challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.
This book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, the author argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship.
This is the story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. The author builds the case that it was mass slavery--more than epidemics--that decimated Indian populations across North America.
This book explores the ways science, politics, and large corporations affect race in the twenty-first century, discussing the efforts and results of the Human Genome Project, and describing how technology-driven science researchers are developing a genetic definition of race.
In this book, the author shows how lynching in America has endured, evolved, and changed in meaning over the course of three centuries, from its origins in early Virginia to the present day.
When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would become a cultural movement. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. This book teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too
This book examines how the rise of the car, that symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing--with disastrous consequences for racial equality in our criminal justice system. The author reveals how the rise of the automobile transformed American freedom in radical ways, leading us to accept--and expect--pervasive police power. As this book makes clear, this expectation has had far-reaching political and legal consequences.
In May 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while police attempted to question her about a shootout that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, she recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism.
The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.
This book takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for a collection of essays and poems about race.
The author chronicles the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
Isabel Wilkerson explores how America has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, she explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations. Using riveting stories about people, she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
This list of 30 titles explores Asian American history, society, and culture. The term "Asian American" encompasses a variety of nationalities and accompanying differences, and this is a just a small selection of related books. It was curated by Beth Carmichael in May 2021.
Contents:
We are here because you were there -- Unburdening empire : the cultural politics of Asian American difference -- An ever-emergent empire : the discourse of American exceptionalism -- "The American earth was like a huge heart" : old dreams and the new imperialism -- Uplifting race, reconstructing empire -- "Everybody wants to be Farrah" : absurd histories and historical absurdities -- Pay any price, bear any burden.
How many lives fit in a lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America--haunted by the political upheaval in the Philippines and disowned by her parents--she's already on her third. Her uncle gives her a fresh start in the Bay Area, and he doesn't ask about her past. His younger wife knows enough to keep her head down. But their daughter--the first American-born daughter in the family--can't resist asking Hero about her damaged hands. This book is a sprawling, soulful debut about three generations of women struggling to balance the promise of the American dream and the unshakeable grip of history.
In 1864, as the Civil War still raged, throngs of Chinese immigrants began to converge on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad. Over the next five years, they blasted tunnels through the granite cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laid tracks across the burning Nevada and Utah deserts. As many as twelve hundred lost their lives along the route. Those who survived would suffer a different kind of death: a historical one. Chang retraces the laborers' odyssey, showing how they lived, ate, fought, loved, worked, and worshiped.
Built around a central essay looking at the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the events in Ferguson, Missouri, the author questions the value of "the diversity discussion" in an era of increasing racial and economic segregation. He unpacks the return of student protest across the country and reveals how the debate over inclusion and free speech was presaged by similar protests in the 1980s and '90s. He looks at how culture impacts our understanding of the politics of this polarized moment.
Contents: Racial melancholia : model minorities, depression, and suicide -- Desegregating love : transnational adoption, racial reparation, and racial transitional objects -- Racial dissociation : parachute children and psychic nowhere -- (Gay) panic attack : coming out in a colorblind age.
Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. In reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from across Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition? Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America.
Until the political ferment of the Long Sixties, there were no Asian Americans. There were only isolated communities of mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos lumped together as "Orientals." This book tells the story of the social and cultural movement that knit these disparate communities into a political identity, the history of how-and why-the double consciousness of Asian American came to be.
This book discusses the idea of 'yellow peril' which is a pervasive racist idea in Western culture-dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment.
One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, this is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been taken away--and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.
Pt. 1. Beginnings : Asians in the Americas. Pt. 2. The making of Asian America during the age of mass migration and Asian exclusion. Pt. 3. Asian America in a world at war. Pt. 4. Remaking Asian America in a globalized world. Pt. 5. Twenty-first-century Asian Americans.
The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. Here the author shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation. Americans have been wary of almost every group of foreigners that has come to the United States. Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement in the 1850s. Over the century that followed, Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported.
Sooner or later every Asian American must deal with the question "Where do you come from?" It is a tip-off to the persistent notion that people of Asian ancestry are not real Americans, that "Orientals" never really stop being loyal to their foreign homeland, no matter how long they or their families have been in this country. Confronting the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to Asian Americans over the last 150 years, the author seizes the label "Oriental" and asks where it came from.
In this novel, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn't yet feel like home.
Arissa Oh argues that international adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War. First established as an emergency measure through which to evacuate mixed-race "GI babies," it became a mechanism through which the Korean government exported its unwanted children. Focusing on the legal, social, and political systems at work, this book shows how the growth of Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context of the neocolonial U.S.-Korea relationship.
The brutal and systematic 'ethnic cleansing' of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking - and virtually unexplored - chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation's past.
This book attacks the two pillars of the "model minority" image, that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant, and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes. Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to challenge arguments about South Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians
This book is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.
The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
This book addresses some of the most controversial contemporary issues: discrimination, immigration, diversity, globalization, and the mixed-race movement, introducing the example of Asian Americans to shed new light on the current debates. Combining personal anecdotes, social-science research, legal cases, history, and original journalistic reporting, Wu discusses damaging Asian American stereotypes such as "the model minority" and "the perpetual foreigner."
Beginning in 1968, a motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs from San Francisco's Chinatown make their way through the history of the day, becoming caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil that culminate in their effort to save the International Hotel--epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement
Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.
This groundbreaking book traces the transformation of Asian Americans from a few small, disconnected, and largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society. It explores the events that shocked Asian Americans into motion and shaped a new consciousness.
The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.
The chef behind Momofuku and star of Netflix's Ugly Delicious gets uncomfortably real in his debut memoir. Here he recounts the improbable series of events that led him to the top of his profession. He wrestles with his lifelong feelings of otherness and inadequacy, explores the mental illness that almost killed him, and finds hope in the shared value of deliciousness.
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But Nicole grew up facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, and wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. Here Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, and chronicles the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets.
An updated and annotated anthology of published articles written by a respected historian of Japanese American history. Featuring selected inmates and camp groups who spearheaded resistance movements in the ten War Relocation Authority-administered compounds. Provides an understanding how some of the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans opposed threat.
Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake enriches and expands on her signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and the tangled ties between generations. The novel journeys with the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in India through their fraught transformation into Americans.
At the age of 12, Sharmila Sen emigrated from India to the U.S. The year was 1982, and everywhere she turned, she was asked to self-report her race: on INS forms, at the doctor's office, in middle school. Never identifying with a race in the India of her childhood, she rejects her new "not quite" designation: not quite white, not quite black, not quite Asian, and spends much of her life attempting to blend into American whiteness. But after her teen years trying to assimilate, she is forced to reckon with the hard questions: What does it mean to be white, why does whiteness retain the magic cloak of invisibility while other colors are made hypervisible, and how much does whiteness figure into Americanness?
This is a selection of books that focuses or provides context on the Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, and racial injustice. This book list was curated by Vanessa Sanjuan-Miranda in February 2021.
A memoir by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement explains the movement's position of love, humanity, and justice, challenging perspectives that have negatively labeled the movement's activists while calling for essential political changes.
In this book, the author explores America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police.
Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, this novel is both a global dystopian narrative and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella--through visits both mundane and supernatural--tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down.
This is a benefit comic book anthology that focuses on hot-button issues including police brutality, the justice system, and civil rights, with one primary goal: show pictures and tell stories that get people talking.
As a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King has become one of the most recognizable and powerful voices on the front lines of civil rights in our time. His commitment to reforming the justice system and making America a more equitable place has brought challenges and triumphs, soaring victories and crushing defeats. In Make Change, King offers an inspiring look at the moments that have shaped his life and considers the ways social movements can grow and evolve in this hyper-connected era. He shares stories from his efforts leading the Raise the Age campaign and his work fighting police brutality, while providing a roadmap for how to stay sane, safe, and motivated even in the worst of political climates. By turns infuriating, inspiring, and educational, Make Change will resonate with those who believe that America can-and must-do better.
The author makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, she examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital, but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability.
The author argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. She shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.
This book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, the author argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship.
The author chronicles the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. Only Starr knows what really happened that night, but what she does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
In these explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, the author 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.
This history of anti-black racism focuses on the lives of five major players in American history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and activist Angela Davis. It highlights the debates that took place between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists.
The author's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when her parents told her they named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. She grew up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, and has spent her life navigating America's racial divide as a writer, a speaker, and an expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion. While so many institutions claim to value diversity in their mission statements, many fall short of matching actions to words. Brown highlights how white middle-class evangelicalism has participated in the rise of racial hostility, and encourages the reader to confront apathy and recognize God's ongoing work in the world.
In these essays, brought together by the scholar Wahneema Lubiano, some of today’s most respected intellectuals share their ideas on race, power, gender, and society. The authors, including Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms.
When sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing, classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who happens to be the older brother of his best friend. The story is told through Rashad and Quinn's alternating viewpoints
As teenagers in Nigeria, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. But their homeland is under military dictatorship and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu decides to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected.
This collection of essays by scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," and offers powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of moral, social, political, and economic equality. These essays on the black experience in America range from sociological studies of the African American community to illuminating discourses on religion and "Negro music," and remain essential reading in our so-called "post-racial age."
March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.
Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.
Expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
The author surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.
Drawing on black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, this book call for the social justice movement for black liberation be more radical, more queer, and more feminist. The book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. It provides a framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.
A darkly funny and heartfelt debut novel about what it means to grow up young and black on the south side of Chicago when it feels like your choices are slim to none. Claude McKay Love is an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change. When riots consume his neighborhood he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago to go to college, find a new identity, and leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. Is there is any safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America?
“In Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor makes an enormous contribution to the collective understanding of the methods and mechanics of racial capitalism, revealing how the real estate industry’s long history of discrimination against African Americans has adapted from explicit policies of racist exclusion to equally devastating predatory financial mechanisms.” —Naomi Klein
At once a powerful evocation of his childhood in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, The Fire Next Time, which galvanized the nation in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, stands as one of the essential works of our literature.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.
These 26 titles address the hotly debated issue of immigration from all angles: political, economic, cultural, emotional. This book list was curated by Devin McKinney in February 2021.
58 essays, short stories and poems give insight to the challenges, hopes, and dreams, of young people trying to make sense of their lives, identities, futures. In these deeply personal reflections on the journey to a new country and poignant recollections of loved ones, languages, and cultures they left behind, we see moments of sadness alongside flourishes of wit and vivacity. Throughout, we see strength, resolve, and the dignity that should make every American honored to call them one of us.
At 11, the author came to the US from Mexico on a tourist visa to be reunited with her parents. When her visa expired four years later, she became an undocumented immigrant. Thus began her decades-long underground existence. After the Texas Dream Act made a college degree possible, Julissa's grades and leadership landed her an internship at Goldman Sachs, which led ultimately to a vice-presidency. In telling her story of separation, grief, and redemption, she shifts the immigrant conversation and changes the perception of what it means to be an undocumented immigrant.
Despite extensive media coverage of the southern border and Donald Trump's proposed wall, most English speakers have had little access to the many Mexican perspectives on the ongoing crisis. The authors redress this imbalance, drawing on writing by journalists, novelists, and documentarians who are Mexican or Mexico-based. They discuss important questions, including the history of US-Mexico relations, and questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and borders.
This book provides factual information to readers who are interested in learning more about the issues involved in undocumented immigration, and about people who are labeled "illegal." Each chapter draws on both existing and original research to provide an accessible overview of key themes, and case studies bring the issues to life.
Journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Born in Ecuador and brought to the United States at five, she became one of the first undocumented students admitted into Harvard. She weaves her own story with those of the 11 million undocumented who have been thrust into the national conversation today as never before. This book brings to light remarkable stories of hope and resilience, and through them we come to understand what it truly means to be American.
Jaime, 12, and Angela, 15, discover what it means to be living as undocumented immigrants in the United States, while news from home gets increasingly worse.
This is the first full-length book explicitly linking prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants. With an eye to racialized and gendered technologies of power, Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are depicted as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within the neoliberal labor market. Escobar also explores the relationship between the immigrant-rights and the prison-abolition movements, scrutinizing a variety of institutions working on solutions to social problems that lead to imprisonment.
An anthology of essays by migration scholars telling fieldwork-based stories of those affected by US immigration law enforcement.
Reyna Grande brings to life her tumultuous early years in this story of a childhood torn between parents and countries. As her parents make the dangerous trek across the Mexican border in pursuit of the American dream, Reyna and her siblings are forced into the overburdened household of their stern grandmother. When their mother returns, Reyna prepares for her own journey to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years: her long-absent father. This memoir reminds us that the joys and sorrows we experience are imprinted on the heart forever, calling out to us of those places we first called home.
The author draws portraits of the migrants and anti-immigrant zealots he encountered in his investigations in Europe and on the US-Mexico border. This research and global perspective identify the common characteristics of immigration policy across the rich world, and raise pressing questions about the future of national boundaries and universal values.
The author, who went from undocumented little boy to "hyper-documented" university professor, delves into the key moments of cultural transition throughout his childhood and adulthood: police at the back door waiting to deport his family, the ex-girlfriend who threatens to call INS and report him, and the interactions with law enforcement even after he is no longer undocumented.
By June 2018, Donald Trump's most notorious decision as president had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the administration's systematic separation of migrant families at the US-Mexico border. Soboroff traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the US border, where they were separated.
In the 1970s, the Mexican government acted to alleviate rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions crossed into the US, took low-level positions, sent money back to those depending on their support, and then found themselves caught between competing governments: the fruits of their labor were needed in both places, and yet neither country made them feel welcome. This book draws on private letters, songs, and oral testimony to recreate the experience of circular migration, which reshaped communities in the US and Mexico.
For author the author, the son and husband of Spanish-speaking immigrants, the battle for immigration reform is personal. Mulligan Sepúlveda writes of visiting border detention centers, defending undocumented immigrants in court, and taking his services to JFK Airport to represent people being turned away at the gates during Trump's infamous travel ban.
A controversial aspect of the immigration debate is the criminalization both of extralegal immigration to the US and of immigrants themselves. The author examines the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which attempted a radically different approach to a major issue but further entrenched the approach it was designed to supplant. The failure of this effort at decriminalization helped lead to the stalemate on immigration policy that persists to this day.
This work examines the plight of undocumented Latino students as represented by their immigrant status. It shows the hard work and perseverance of these students and their families; their commitment to education and civic participation; and their sense of uncertainty and marginality. It also presents a framework for educational policies that recognizes the merit and potential of undocumented Latino students, and links their situation to social and policy issues of immigration reform and higher education access.
This book traces the transition of immigration enforcement from a traditionally federal power exercised primarily near US borders to a patchwork system of local policing extending throughout the country's interior. While some localities have resisted the work of policing immigrants, others have aggressively sought unauthorized immigrants. The result is a system that threatens the core crime-fighting mission of policing by promoting racial profiling, creating fear in immigrant communities, and undermining the critical community-based function of local policing.
This book reviews the struggle of undocumented immigrant students to gain access to college by paying in-state tuition rates. Undocumented students seek equality under the law while affirming their humanity and thus their rights as human beings; undocumented immigrants seek to overturn government and media images that portray them as aliens and "illegals," devoid of all rights simply because they are working and living in a country other than the one in which they were born.
Ediberto Román takes on critics of Latina/o immigration, drawing on empirical evidence to refute charges of links between immigration and crime, economic downfall, and a weakening of Anglo culture. Román utilizes government statistics, economic data, historical records, and social science research to provide a counter-narrative to what he argues is a largely one-sided public discourse on Latino/a immigration.
In this deeply researched but also deeply personal book, Salam shows why uncontrolled immigration is bad for everyone, including people like his family. Rejecting both militant multiculturalism and white-identity politics, he argues that limiting total immigration and favoring skilled immigrants will combat rising inequality, balance diversity with assimilation, and foster a new nationalism that puts the interests of all Americans, both native- and foreign-born, first.
Migration from Mexico to the US has become an increasingly volatile topic. With the constant buzz about migration in the political, economic, and legal spheres, the migrants themselves become a dehumanized multitude. This book puts a human face on the issues, and turns statistics into individuals with real lives, needs, and desires. Its findings have broad implications for both those interested in migration from Mexico to the United States and international migration scholars.
This book tells the story of six Central American and Mexican children, driven from their homes by violence and deprivation, who embark alone on the perilous journey north. It looks inside a vast, labyrinthine system, documenting in detail the experiences of these youths, from arrest by immigration authorities to their subsequent placement in federal detention, from their appearance in deportation proceedings and release from custody to, finally, their struggle to build new lives in the US.
This book describes the "raid mentality" of our response to immigration, which seeks violent solutions to a social phenomenon. He considers the culture clash over Chicano ethnic studies in Tucson, examines the consequences of an immigration raid in New Bedford, and explores the civil rights activism of young "Dreamers." The current "round them up, deport them, militarize the border" approach, Tirman shows, solves nothing.
"When I was 12," the author writes, "my mother sent me to the US to live with her parents. While applying for a driver's permit, I found out my papers were fake. More than two decades later, I am still here illegally, with no clear path to American citizenship. This is not a book about the politics of immigration. It's a book about the unsettled, unmoored psychological state in which undocumented immigrants find ourselves. It is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can't. It is about what it means to not have a home."
After escaping a detention center at the US border, 17-year-old Marisol agrees to participate in a medical experiment, hoping to keep her and her younger sister, Gabi, from being deported to El Salvador.
This book, chronicling the next chapter in civil rights, is the story of a movement and a nation, witnessed through the poignant and inspiring experiences of five young undocumented activists who are transforming society's attitudes toward one of the most contentious political matters roiling America today: immigration.
This is the story of immigrant workers who have come to the United States without papers. Every day, these men and women join the work force and contribute positively to society. The story is told via the ancient Mixtec codex--accordion fold--format. Juan grew up in Mexico working in the fields to help provide for his family. Struggling for money, Juan crosses over into the United States and becomes an undocumented worker, living in a poor neighborhood, working hard to survive. Though he is able to get a job as a busboy at a restaurant, he is severely undercompensated--he receives less than half of the minimum wage. Risking his boss reporting him to the authorities for not having proper resident papers, Juan risks everything and stands up for himself and the rest of the community.
In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are concepts that were created to exclude and exploit. With a focus on US policy, she probes how people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status—and to what ends. Blending history with human drama, Chomsky explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic, and historical context. The result is a powerful testament of the complex, contradictory, and ever-shifting nature of status in America.
Explore Indigenous Identity in the U.S.and across the globe. This book list of 30 titles was selected by Beth Carmichael in March 2021 from a list curated by Students for Indigenous Awareness.
The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to "a mind spread out on the ground." The author 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. Her writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation.
oy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history ... Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings
Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In this book the author locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.
Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance.
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.
This is a powerful and inviting collection of Tiffany Midge's musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in modern America
This is an account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, the author allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated.
This collection interweaves the voices of students' descendants, poets, and activists with Native scholarship to reveal the complex history and enduring legacies of the school that spearheaded the federal campaign for Indian assimilation.
This story, set on an Indian reservation just after World War II, concerns the return home of a war-weary Laguna Pueblo young man. Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.
It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church--a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But she does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.
This book is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. It is a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father-an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist-who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.
When Louise Wolfe's boyfriend mocks and disrespects Native people in front of her, she breaks things off and dumps him She'd rather spend her senior year with her family and friends and working on the school newspaper. The editors pair her up with Joey Kairouz, an ambitious new photojournalist, and in no time the paper's staff find themselves with a major story to cover: the school musical director's inclusive approach to casting The Wizard of Oz has been provoking backlash in their mostly white, middle-class Kansas town.
Hope Matters, written by multiple award-winning author Lee Maracle and her daughters Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter, focuses on the journey of Indigenous people from colonial beginnings to reconciliation. During their youth, Bobb and Carter wrote poetry with their mother, and they all decided that one day they would write a book together. Written collaboratively by all three women, the poems in Hope Matters blend their voices together into a shared song of hope and reconciliation.
The author refocuses discussion of Native America away from governmentally imposed stereotypes and onto a nexus of discourse and ideology, showing how it changes yet continues Euro-American expectations of "Indians." His categories--violence, representation, athletics, technology, and music--move from well-told, pivotal histories emphasizing crossed cultural signals into theoretical analyses of the ideological discourses that developed from them into popular expectations.
According to its public institutions, there are no Indians in Pennsylvania. The state is amongst the few not to recognize Native American nations and to have no reservations. The authors sought out those who considered themselves Native Americans in Pennsylvania. The book examines the history of Native Americans in Pennsylvania and their status under the law, stereotypes and myths Indians face, their personal identity and spirituality, conflicts, organizations and events. The results clearly show what happens when people are marginalized out of official existence.
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Hamalainen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, and then as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.
The history of Indian removal has often followed a single narrative arc, one that begins with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and follows the Cherokee Trail of Tears. But Indian removal in the Old Northwest was much more complicated--involving many Indian peoples and more than just one policy, event, or politician. This book takes a broader look at northern Indian removal--and in so doing amplifies the history of Indian removal and of the United States.
This book explores intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities--and strategies for healing--with provocative prose and an empathetic approach. Indigenous peoples have shockingly higher rates of addiction, depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions. How are we to turn this desperate tide? With passionate argumentation and chillingly clear prose, the author uses her own and others' stories to trace the roots of colonial trauma and the mechanisms by which trauma has become intergenerational, and she explores the Indigenous ways of knowing that can lead us toward change.
For the loosely connected Seneca community members living in Upstate New York, intergenerational memory slips into everyday life: a teenager struggles to understand her grandmother's silences, a family seeks to reconnect with a lost sibling, and a young woman searches for a cave that's called to her family for generations. With these stories, debut writer Melissa Michal weaves together an understated and contemplative collection exploring what it means to be Native.
Introduction: Why rearticulation matters -- Set the prisoners free : the Christian right and the prison industrial complex -- "The one who did not break his promises" : Native nationalisms and the Christian right -- "Without apology" : Native American and evangelical feminisms -- Unlikely allies : rethinking coalition politics -- Native women and sovereignty : beyond the nation-state.
This book explores the Indigenous view of reality--delving into art, myth, ceremony, and symbol--as well as the practice of Native science in the physical sphere. It examines the multiple levels of meaning that inform Native astronomy, cosmology, psychology, agriculture, and the healing arts. An understanding of the relationships that bind together natural forces and all forms of life has been fundamental to the ability of Indigenous peoples to live for millennia in spiritual and physical harmony with the land. The First Peoples offer perspectives that can help us work toward solutions at this time of global environmental crisis.
This volume gathers twenty-one poets of diverse ages, styles, languages, and tribal affiliations to present the range and power of new Native poetry. These poets, whose first books were published after the year 2000, highlight the works coming up after Joy Harjo and Sherman Alexie. They include long narratives, political outcries, experimental works, and traditional lyrics.
Presents a history of the Native American Church and discusses its leadership, religious beliefs and practices, and the long-accepted sacrament of Peyote.
The author examines Native American reservation life--past and present--illuminating misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He also explores crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture.
This book showcases 22 contemporary Native writers and their provocative approaches to form. Organized into four sections inspired by different aspects of and strategies for basket weaving, the essays presented here demonstrate how Native writers manipulate the shape of creative nonfiction to offer incisive observations, critiques and commentary on our political, social and cultural world.
Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world.
Presented in the form of interconnected short stories, each told from a different point of view, this novel provides a snapshot of the life of one Native American tribe from the 1860s through the 1980s.
The author offers an unconventional account of Indian-White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging across the centuries and the Canada-U.S. border, the author debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.
A spare, lyrical Native American coming of age story set in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s. With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself--that is, until he meets the seventeen-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American backgrounds and tumultuous paths through the foster care system.
Learn more about any aspect of LGBTQIA+ identities. This book list (26 titles) was created by Janelle Wertzberger in February 2021 and updated in May 2021.
Haunted and haunting, Jones's memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another--and to one another--as we fight to become ourselves.
In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent and created an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped, and tortured. Homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. And yet, five cantoras--women who "sing"--somehow, miraculously, find each other. Cantoras is a breathtaking novel of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit.
Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
Internet creator and activist Jackson Bird demystifies the transgender experience by sharing his own story, while debunking trans history milestones and educating readers with Transgender 101 facts.
YouTuber Ashley Mardell looks at all things LGBT+. Whether you are a questioning teen, a teacher or parent looking for advice or anyone wanting to learn the language of respect, this book is an essential guide for you.
Amanda Hardy is the new girl in school in Lambertville, Tennessee. There's a reason why she transferred schools for her senior year, and why she's determined not to get too close to anyone...because the secret that Amanda's been keeping? It's that she used to be Andrew.
This memoir gives the perspective of being young, multiracial, economically challenged, and transgender in America.
2019 Stonewall Book Award for Literature. Two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the 1980s AIDS epidemic and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.
Using bisexuality as a frame, this book questions the division of sexuality into straight and gay, in a timely exploration of the complex histories and psychologies of human desire.
This anthology of personal, accessible narratives looks at the contemporary bisexual experience.
A candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, as well as a call to action for justice for intersex people.
This highly illustrated nonfiction book explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do. The authors show how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology, and how these views have been disputed and challenged. Each page focuses on a specific aspect of the subject.
American culture has shaped the queer experience and LGBT people have shaped the U.S. This book covers centuries--from Columbus' arrival and the brutal treatment of the Native peoples, through the American Revolution's radical challenging of sex and gender roles, to the violent and liberating 19th century, and the transformative social justice movements of the 20th.
Brave, witty and empowering, this graphic memoir follows Rebecca as she navigates her asexual identity and mental health in a world obsessed with sex. From school to work to relationships, this book offers unparalleled insight into asexuality.
When their daughter Rosie was born intersex, Eric and Stephani Lohman found themselves being pressured to consent to "normalizing" surgery without being offered any alternatives despite their concerns. Part memoir, part guidebook, this powerful book tells the authors' experience of refusing to have Rosie operated on and how they raised a child who is intersex.
These poems investigate inherited forms of love and family -- the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes -- all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, it embraces the loss, grief, and joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.
In this bold, illustrated memoir, a young woman shares both a personal and sociological take on modern, "unconventional" love, exploring her own transformation from serial monogamist to proud polyamorist.
This book addresses the emerging field of genderqueer or non-binary genders. It considers theoretical, research, practice, and activist perspectives; and outlines a basis for good practice when working with non-binary individuals.
If you've ever questioned the logic of basing an entire identity around what you have between your legs, it's time to embark on a daring escape outside of the binary box. Open your eyes to what it means to be a boy or a girl -- and above and beyond!
2003 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction.
In 1974, a student at a girls' school finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them leads her to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
Ijeoma, a young Nigerian girl displaced during their civil war, begins a love affair with another refugee girl from a different ethnic community. When the pair are discovered, she must learn the cost of living a lie amidst taboos and prejudices. Ijeoma seeks a glimmer of hope for a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.
Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay."
An acclaimed essayist's memoir about finding personal redemption in female friends and lovers after growing up in a wealthy but dysfunctional Florida family.
2012 Stonewall Honor Book (Literature)
In 1968, into the devastating, spare atmosphere of the remote coastal town of Labrador, Canada, a child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor fully girl, but both at once. Only three people are privy to the secret--the baby's parents and a trusted neighbor and midwife...
This book explores the history, terminology, types, politics, discrimination, and medical and social realities of the transgender population. Written by a social worker, popular educator, and member of the transgender community, it combines an accessible portrait of transgenderism with a rich history of transgender life and its unique experiences of discrimination.
This list was curated by Thea Toocheck '21 as part of a Peace and Justice Studies senior project. The list compiles twenty books by BIPOC women authors. Most are young adult fiction novels that feature women protagonists of color facing issues like sexism or an exploration of sexual identity within a variety of different cultures. They draw attention to the intersectional experiences of global human struggles such as love, hope, and coming of age.
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, Xiomara Batista has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. She pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. Mami is determined to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, and Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. When she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she can't stop thinking about performing her poems.
Seventeen-year-old Zélie, her older brother Tzain, and rogue princess Amari fight to restore magic to the land and activate a new generation of magi, but they are ruthlessly pursued by the crown prince, who believes the return of magic will mean the end of the monarchy.
Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she's known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community's past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block--her neighbor Theo. But Sydney and Theo's deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised. When does coincidence become conspiracy' Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out' Can Sydney and Theo trust each other--or themselves--long enough to find out before they too disappear?
Joan has been searching for her missing husband, Victor, for nearly a year - ever since that terrible night they'd had their first serious argument. Still grieving and severely hungover, Joan hears Victor's unmistakable voice coming from inside a revival tent in a gritty Walmart parking lot. He has the same face, the same eyes, the same hands. He doesn't recognize Joan, insists his name is Eugene Wolff, and that he is a reverend whose mission is to spread the word of Jesus and grow His flock. Joan turns to Ajean, an elderly foul-mouthed card shark who is one of the few among Métis community steeped in the traditions of the Métis people and knowledgeable about their ancient enemies
It is the time of the Mexican Revolution. A young girl, Tita, lives with her mother, Mama Elena, and her two older sisters on a ranch near the Mexican and U.S. border. Tita longs to marry her lover, Pedro, but can never have him because of her mother's upholding of the family tradition of the youngest daughter not marrying but taking care of her mother until the day she dies. Tita is only able to express herself when she cooks and each section of the book begins with a Mexican recipe. The preparation of each dish is tied to an event in the Tita's life and soon, her emotions begin to infuse with her food.
In a place like no other, on an island in the shape of a tear drop, two sisters are born into a family of the oracle. Kamikuu, with creamy skin and almond eyes, is admired far and wide; Namima, small but headstrong, learns to live in her sister's shadow.
In the valley of Fruitless mountain, a young girl named Minli lives in a ramshackle hut with her parents. In the evenings, her father regales her with old folktales of the Jade Dragon and the Old Man on the Moon, who knows the answers to all of life's questions. Inspired by these stories, Minli sets off on an extraordinary journey to find the Old Man on the Moon to ask him how she can change her family's fortune. She encounters an assorted cast of characters and magical creatures along the way, including a dragon who accompanies her on her quest for the ultimate answer.
This book is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father-an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist-who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.
After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemi Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find--her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemi knows little about the region. Noemi is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin's new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemi; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi's dreams with visions of blood and doom. Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family's youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemi, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family's past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family's once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemi digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.
Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart.
This is a retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father is not a very good one. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has left his family on the edge of poverty--until Miryem intercedes. She sets out to retrieve what is owed, and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold. But when an ill-advised boast brings her to the attention of the cold creatures who haunt the wood, nothing will be the same again. For words have power, and the fate of a kingdom will be forever altered by the challenge she is issued.
Jessamy Jess Harrison is an eight-year-old caught between two different worlds. The daughter of a British father and a Nigerian mother, she has always felt like a misfit. She is smart and precocious, but cant seem to get along in school; she throws tantrums at random, making life a challenge for her parents. Believing that a change from her English environment might be the perfect antidote to Jesss alarming mood swings, her parents whisk her off to visit relatives in Nigeria. Jesss adjustment to Nigeria is only beginning when she meets Titiola, or TillyTilly, who seems to be invisible to everyone else. Tilly quickly insinuates herself into Jess's life, appearing out of nowhere even after Jess returns to England. At first Tilly is Jess's comfort and delight, but gradually her visits become more disturbing until, eventually, she reveals that Jess had a stillborn twin, and that she intends to be the sister Jess never had. The Icarus Girl is a strikingly original variation on a classic literary theme: the existence of doubles, both real and spiritual, who play havoc with our perceptions and our lives. With grace and confidence, Helen Oyeyemi skillfully blends the motifs of Nigerian folklore with the complexities of cultural displacement to capture the mysterious power of myth to transform reality.
A god will return when the earth and sky converge under the black sun in the holy city of Tova... The winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man's mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain. Crafted with unforgettable characters, the author has created an epic adventure exploring the decadence of power amidst the weight of history and the struggle of individuals swimming against the confines of society and their broken pasts in the most original series debut of the decade.
Twelve-year-old Amal's dream of becoming a teacher one day is dashed in an instant when she accidentally insults a member of her Pakistani village's ruling family. As punishment, she is forced to leave her heartbroken family behind and go work at their estate. Amal is distraught but summons her courage and begins navigating the complex rules of life as a servant, with all its attendant jealousies and pecking-order woes. Most troubling, though, is Amal's increasing awareness of the deadly measures the Khan family will go to in order to stay in control. It's clear that their hold over her village will never loosen as long as everyone is too afraid to challenge them--so if Amal is to have any chance of ensuring her loved ones' safety and winning back her freedom, she must find a way to work with the other servants to make it happen.
Ink is in their blood. On the heels of a family tragedy, Katie Greene must move halfway across the world. Stuck with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, Katie feels lost. Alone. She doesn't know the language, she can barely hold a pair of chopsticks and she can't seem to get the hang of taking her shoes off whenever she enters a building. When Katie meets aloof but gorgeous Tomohiro, the star of the school's kendo team, she is intrigued by him ... and a little scared. His tough attitude seems meant to keep her at a distance, and when they're near each other, strange things happen. Pens explode. Ink drips from nowhere. And unless Katie is seeing things, drawings come to life. Somehow Tomo is connected to the kami, powerful ancient beings who once ruled Japan--and as feelings develop between Katie and Tomo, things begin to spiral out of control. The wrong people are starting to ask questions, and if they discover the truth, no one will be safe.
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. Only Starr knows what really happened that night, but what she does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.
Two teens--Daniel, the son of Korean shopkeepers, and Natasha, whose family is here illegally from Jamaica--cross paths in New York City on an eventful day in their lives--Daniel is on his way to an interview with a Yale alum, Natasha is meeting with a lawyer to try and prevent her family's deportation to Jamaica--and fall in love.
On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie -- a good life. But after they leave Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud American cousins, Chantal, Donna, and Princess; the grittiness of Detroit's West Side; a new school; and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world, a dangerous proposition presents itself, and Fabiola soon realizes that freedom comes at a cost. Trapped at the crossroads of an impossible choice, will she pay the price for the American dream?
For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of Ziran. But when a vengeful spirit abducts his younger sister, Nadia, as payment to enter the city, Malik strikes a fatal deal--kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran, for Nadia's freedom. But Karina has deadly aspirations of her own. Her mother, the Sultana, has been assassinated; her court threatens mutiny; and Solstasia looms like a knife over her neck. Grief-stricken, Karina decides to resurrect her mother through ancient magic ... requiring the beating heart of a king. And she knows just how to obtain one: by offering her hand in marriage to the victor of the Solstasia competition. When Malik rigs his way into the contest, they are set on a heart-pounding course to destroy each other. But as attraction flares between them and ancient evils stir, will they be able to see their tasks to the death?
The del Cisne girls have never just been sisters; they're also rivals, Blanca as obedient and graceful as Roja is vicious and manipulative. They know that, because of a generations-old spell, their family is bound to a bevy of swans deep in the woods. They know that, one day, the swans will pull them into a dangerous game that will leave one of them a girl, and trap the other in the body of a swan. But when two local boys become drawn into the game, the swans' spell intertwines with the strange and unpredictable magic lacing the woods, and all four of their fates depend on facing truths that could either save or destroy them ... The story of the ugly duckling was never about the cygnet discovering he is lovely. It is about the sudden understanding that you are something other than what you thought you were.
In a world inspired by ancient Arabia, seventeen-year-old huntress Zafira must disguise herself as a man to seek a lost artifact that could return magic to her cursed world.
Zafira is the Hunter, disguising herself as a man when she braves the cursed forest of the Arz to feed her people. Nasir is the Prince of Death, assassinating those foolish enough to defy his autocratic father, the king. Both are legends in the kingdom of Arawiya-- but neither wants to be. When Zafira embarks on a quest to uncover a lost artifact that can restore magic to her suffering world and stop the Arz, Nasir is sent by the king on a similar mission: retrieve the artifact and kill the Hunter.
In 1926 Shanghai, eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, heir of the Scarlet Gang, and her first love-turned-rival Roma Montagov, leader of the White Flowers, must work together when mysterious deaths threaten their city
Ximena is the decoy Condesa, a stand-in for the last remaining Illustrian royal. Her people lost everything when the usurper, Atoc, used an ancient relic to summon ghosts and drive the Illustrians from La Ciudad. Now Ximena's motivated by her insatiable thirst for revenge, and her rare ability to spin thread from moonlight. When Atoc demands the real Condesa's hand in marriage, it's Ximena's duty to go in her stead. She relishes the chance, as Illustrian spies have reported that Atoc's no longer carrying his deadly relic. If Ximena can find it, she can return the true aristócrata to their rightful place.