Mystery Writers Unmasking Larger Issues
Fiction is often a vehicle for confronting political issues, and the mystery genre is no exception. Former newspaper reporter Jennifer K. Morita’s debut mystery, Ghosts of Waikīkī, features an out-of-work journalist looking into the murder…
Seeking Justice in Historical Fiction
What lengths would you go to to prove your innocence? For Anglo-Indian nurse Sona, it’s following a cryptic note and four paintings that lead her around Europe to uncover details about the complicated personal life of the renowned painter…
Healing, Activism and Collective Liberation: Strategies for Building a New World
This panel unites four transformative leaders pioneering the incorporation of healing into activism, demonstrating how personal transformation fuels collective liberation. Their work bridges social justice and healing, emphasizing the need for…
Strength and Solace in Numbers
In times of love and loss, demonstrations of care can be another form of activism. This sentiment is perhaps most evident in the AIDS epidemic, when physical touch became paradoxically a symbol of tenderness yet agonizingly painful for someone…
“Writing as an Other”
“What is the relationship between the role of the outsider and literary writing?” Pulitzer Prize-winning Viet Thanh Nguyen poses this question in his new book To Save and To Destroy, which is based on a series of six lectures at Harvard.…
Healing and Resistance
In the face of direct oppression and attack on vulnerable communities throughout our nation’s history, especially from the current administration, this moment demands all aspects of resistance: self-nourishment, community healing, and defiance…
Finding Your Place in Middle Grade
How does a middle schooler learn to fit in? In Lisa Moore Ramée’s The Everybody Experiment, Kylie takes a scientific approach to “become mature” by doing what everybody else does, while Ming Lee from Arree Chung’s latest graphic novel,…
The End of the (Fantastical) World: Complicated Relationships in Dystopia
If the world was ending, we’d want to be next to these dystopian reads that also warm the heart! The Art Thieves, a work of Cherokee Futurismby Andrea L. Rogers, begins amidst a climate crisis in 2052, when a high-school museum employee becomes…
All Bodies All Selves
As we face increasing attacks on our bodily autonomy from our federal and state governments, these books provide essential resources and narratives that approach the topic with acuity and compassion. Award-winning author Zetta Elliott reflects…
Follow Your Heart to Graphic Novels
Whether in a comic panel or at a panel discussion, these earnest graphic novel stories are here to remind us to stay true to ourselves, our beliefs, and our passions! Follow Huda Fahmy’s exhilarating and chaotic family vacation to Disney World,…