Make Me Rain: Poems and Prose by Nikki Giovanni
You cannot read Nikki Giovanni’s poetry and prose without being grateful to be a part of her life. She’s mentored us through poems like Nikki Rosa [“Black love is Black wealth...
Author: Kate
When the Apricots Bloom by Gina Wilkinson
In 2002, Australian foreign correspondent Gina Wilkinson was living and working in Bangkok when her Canadian husband was offered a posting in Baghdad working for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)....
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdich
In the Afterword and Acknowledgments to The Night Watchman, Ms. Erdich states that “if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits...
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
A Charlotte Mecklenburg Adult Services Librarian facilitates the book club at the West Boulevard branch of which I‘m a proud member. We don’t take ourselves too seriously; we share lots of...
The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson
Nancy Johnson is an award-winning television journalist who makes her fiction debut with The Kindest Lie, a novel less about race than about the sacrifices all of us make to become...
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo describes herself as an activist particularly interested in representing marginalized voices in novels that are “rich, complex, original, exciting, and as readable as possible.” In Girl, Woman, Other, we...
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Years ago, we owned a dog. His name was Chester. He was the most brilliant and willfully disobedient animal we ever owned. He peed on our Christmas trees and humped our...
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Flashback to the early 1960s. I’m attending a top-rated high school in a New York suburb and the one subject in which I continue to participate wholeheartedly is History. It’s the...
The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
In 2018, Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Wonder, among other novels, began The Pull of the Stars inspired by the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Spanish Flu pandemic which killed millions...
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent–strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood,...
