Reading Lists

13 Lists
  • 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
    Scott Chaskey

    As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food

  • Nonfiction
    Chris Dombrowski

    Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way

  • 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
    Arati Kumar-Rao
    Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India’s marginalized landscapes and inhabitants, written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force.”—Robert Macfarlane
  • Poetry
    Ada Limón

    A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
    A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

    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

  • Fiction
    Diane Wilson

    A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

  • Nonfiction
    Margaret Renkl

    From Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

  • Nonfiction
    Kerri ní Dochartaigh

    In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, Kerri ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal after The Troubles.

  • Nonfiction
    Helen Whybrow

    “Sheep have helped me become a good shepherd, not just to them, but to a place that is my sustenance and joy as well as my unending labor and worry.”

    In the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner set out to restore an old…

  • Nonfiction
    Nicholas Triolo

    The Way Around is the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world.”—Robert Moor, author of On Trails: An Exploration

    Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was…

  • 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
    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
    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
    Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor

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

  • 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.”

  • 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
    Amy Leach

    These essays take jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of their many inspirations. Surveying both the tiniest earth dwellers and the most far-flung celestial bodies, this is a book of wonder, one readers cannot help…

  • Nonfiction
    William Souder

    In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as…

  • Nonfiction
    Tim Robinson

    In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape—weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting of sea and shore into the region’s mythologies.

    • Fiction
      Debra Magpie Earling

      Bold, passionate, and more urgent than ever, Debra Magpie Earling’s powerful classic novel is reborn in this new edition.

    • Fiction
      Diane Wilson

      A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

    • Poetry
      Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe

      A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing—and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual.

    • Fiction
      Richard Wagamese

      Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.

    • Nonfiction
      Darrel J. McLeod

      Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.

    • Nonfiction
      Darrel J. McLeod

      Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.

    • Poetry
      Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

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

    • Fiction
      Richard Wagamese

      After suffering a devastating accident, rodeo cowboy Joe Willie Wolfchild retires to his family’s ranch to mend. There he meets Aiden, a troubled city teenager, and Claire, his mother—and three damaged people slowly begin to heal together.

    • Fiction
      Richard Wagamese

      When sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight is summoned by his ailing father, Eldon, Franklin’s sense of duty clashes with the resentment he feels for his father’s many years of neglect and drinking. But when the two men set out together on one last…

    • Poetry
      Michael Bazzett

      By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.

    • Fiction
      Susan Power

      These stories evoke a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times dare…

    • Fiction
      Eric Gansworth

      After a moment of kindness turns tragic, Tommy Jack McMorsey is forced to revisit his past: the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend. Exploring the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions of identity intersect…

    • Fiction
      Galsan Tschinag

      Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life.

    • Nonfiction
      Joseph Bruchac

      This colorful memoir traces the author’s path from “nature nut” to jock to writer, to his home at the end of Ridge Road near where he was raised by his grandparents. Just as essentially, it explores the links between his native Abenaki culture and…

      • Poetry
        Jos Charles

        This National Poetry Series winner defiantly makes space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. These poems stake a claim on the language available to speak about trans experience.

      • Poetry
        Ada Limón

        A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
        A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

        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

      • 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
        Ava Nathaniel Winter
        An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.
      • Nonfiction
        Juliet Patterson

        A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.

      • Nonfiction
        Darrel J. McLeod

        Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.

      • Nonfiction
        Darrel J. McLeod

        Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.

      • Poetry
        Kathy Fagan

        A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
        A Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
        A Williams Carlos Williams Award Recipient

        From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

      • 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
        Ada Limón

        A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
        A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

        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

      • 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
        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
        Kathy Fagan

        The language of trees is the language of love and loss: in this collection, black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them, and cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree’s…

      • Nonfiction
        Alexandra Manglis and Kristen Case

        21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.

      • Poetry
        Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr

        Poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr—living mere miles from each other but separated by lockdown, and inspired by this extraordinary time—began a correspondence in verse.

      • Poetry
        Melissa Kwasny

        Inspired by ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites, this collection captures the intersection of the natural world and sacred art. These poems fill this space with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight suggest the impermanence of life…

      • Poetry
        Melissa Kwasny

        In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision. Touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our…

      • Poetry
        Melissa Kwasny

        Drawing inspiration from Novalis, a poet who believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, this collection divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism…

      • Poetry
        Sally Keith

        These are poems of absence, written in the wake of terrible loss. Addressing death, art, travel, and beauty—assembling a guide to survival in the face of the seemingly insurmountable—this collection finds, in mourning, what it means to survive.

        • Poetry
          Yalie Saweda Kamara

          Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.

        • Poetry
          JJJJJerome Ellis

          A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their

        • Nonfiction
          Chris Dombrowski

          Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way

        • 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
          Michael Kleber-Diggs

          Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

        • Poetry
          Jackson Holbert

          Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.

        • Poetry
          Ryann Stevenson

          Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.

        • Poetry
          Kathy Fagan

          A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
          A Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
          A Williams Carlos Williams Award Recipient

          From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

        • Fiction
          Deni Ellis Béchard

          Assigned to write an exposé on one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo. His harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints.

        • Nonfiction
          Deni Ellis Béchard

          When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional…

          • Poetry
            Yalie Saweda Kamara

            Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.

          • Poetry
            JJJJJerome Ellis

            A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their

          • 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.”

          • Poetry
            Latif Askia Ba

            A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.

            Latif Askia Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors all the things that arise from our…

          • Poetry
            Michael Kleber-Diggs

            Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

          • Poetry
            Keith S. Wilson

            Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the…

          • Poetry
            Ama Codjoe

            Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

          • Nonfiction
            Antonio Michael Downing

            Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.

          • Poetry
            Sean Hill

            From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Minnesota and Georgia—and from the intimate messages of the heart to the global immigration of African Americans—these poems explore with urgency the relationships among travel, alienation, and home. Part…

          • 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…

          • Poetry
            Parneshia Jones

            Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, this collection mines the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence. In the South, “lard sizzles a sermon from the stove”; in Chicago, we feast on an “opera of peppers and pimento”…

          • Nonfiction
            Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor

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

          • Nonfiction
            Alexandra Manglis and Kristen Case

            21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.

          • Poetry
            Ada Limón

            A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
            A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

            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

            • Nonfiction
              Kerri ní Dochartaigh

              In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, Kerri ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal after The Troubles.

            • Nonfiction
              Chris Dombrowski

              Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way

            • Nonfiction
              John Cotter

              A Best Book of the Year at The Vulture

              A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science.

            • Nonfiction
              Antonio Michael Downing

              Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.

            • 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
              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
              Darrel J. McLeod

              Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.

            • Nonfiction
              Darrel J. McLeod

              Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.

            • Nonfiction
              Gregory Orr

              Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.

            • Nonfiction
              Beth Dooley
              Beth Dooley arrived in Minnesota from New Jersey with preconceptions about the Midwestern food scene. Having learned to cook in her grandmother’s kitchen, shopping at farm stands and making preserves, she couldn’t help but wonder, “Do people here…
            • Nonfiction
              Deni Ellis Béchard

              When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional…

            • Nonfiction
              Tim Winton

              In this beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir, Tim Winton explores Australia’s unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped him and his writing.