Reading Lists

9 Lists
  • Nonfiction
    Kazim Ali

    In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.

  • Poetry
    Jennifer Huang

    Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.

  • Poetry
    Su Hwang

    This collection offers a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.

  • Poetry
    Rick Barot

    In The Galleons, Rick Barot widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.

  • Poetry
    Chris Santiago

    Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist &…

  • Poetry
    Lee Ann Roripaugh

    Heian-period Japanese women writers, science fiction, and the author’s own experience as a second-generation immigrant: these are some of the sources these poems use to explore the connection between identity and language. Wonderfully lyrical and…

  • Poetry
    Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

    From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, this collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.

  • Poetry
    Yi Lu

    The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important…

  • Fiction
    Jon Pineda

    When Tom Serafino’s twin sister, Teagan, suffers a debilitating brain injury, a police investigation implicates his playmate’s uncle, Shoe. Innocent of the crime but burdened by his own childhood tragedy, Shoe takes the blame—inviting the question of…

  • Poetry
    Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover

    This groundbreaking anthology presents a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the geographical…

  • Poetry
    Ada Limón
    Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
    An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
  • Poetry
    Ada Limón

    Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated contemporary

  • Nonfiction
    J. Drew Lanham

    This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”

  • Nonfiction
    Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl

    Studded with poems and songs, this correspondence is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and joy.

  • Nonfiction
    Elizabeth Rush

    An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

  • Nonfiction
    Elizabeth Rush

    Rising weaves the firsthand accounts of those who are living through sea level rise today with eyewitness reporting from our shoreline’s disappearing places.

  • Nonfiction
    Kazim Ali

    In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.

  • Nonfiction
    Margaret Renkl

    In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Margaret Renkl’s columns offer a dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville.

  • Nonfiction
    Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor

    A multicultural anthology about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.

  • Nonfiction
    Alison Hawthorne Deming and Lauret Savoy

    For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting…

  • Nonfiction
    Shawn Otto

    At the very time we need them most, scientists and the idea of objective knowledge are being bombarded by a well-funded, three-part war on science. This provocative book investigates why and how, and offers compelling solutions to bring us to our…

  • Nonfiction
    Barry Lopez

    This timely collection—featuring essays from Wendell Berry, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Bill McKibben, and Rebecca Solnit, among others—challenges the division of human society from the natural world that has often characterized traditional…

  • Nonfiction
    Joni Tevis

    From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, the settings of these essays are often places of destruction and loss. And yet this collection transforms these eerie, apocalyptic destinations into sites of…

  • Nonfiction
    Bill McKibben

    From the Adirondack Mountains to Kerala, India, to Curitiba, Brazil, this book offers clear-eyed and profoundly compelling portraits of places where resourceful people have confronted modern problems with inventive solutions, and thrived in the…

  • Poetry
    Claire Wahmanholm

    A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”

  • Poetry
    Rebecca Dunham

    Deepwater Horizon, Hurricane Katrina, Flint: this is the litany of our time, and these are the events traced in these poems, invoking the poet as moral witness. Incorporating interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources, this…