Reading Lists

30 Lists
  • 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

    2023 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.

  • 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
    Jennifer Huang

    Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 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.

  • 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 2023 Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
    The 2023 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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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.