Reading for Social Change is a 12 to 16-week social justice-themed book club that meets virtually once a week for 60-minutes discussions of critically acclaimed books that inspire critical and justice-forward thinking through education and awareness.
Our goal with the Reading for Social Change syllabuses is to expand students' understanding of current social issues through discussing powerful narratives from marginalized voices. Each syllabus touches on race and racial policing, the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, tensions around ethnic difference and gender diversity as well as classism and economic discrimation. Through discussion and open questioning, we hope to guide students in discovering connections and intersections within these stories and to explore their relevance to their own lives and the world at large.
Each text hopes to build on the last and encourages students, regardless of experience, to reflect on our shared histories and our own personal and cultural biases so as to better aid in the fight for the dignity of others.
We would be excited to have new members within the book club and invite you to join us during our next cycle.
Neal Shusterman, Jarrod Shusterman
When the California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, one teen is forced to make life and death decisions for her family in this harrowing story of survival from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman.
Purchase on Amazon ($15)
Everett Maroon
Fifteen-year-old Jack Bishop has mad skills with cars and engines but knows he'll never get a driver's license because of his epilepsy. Agreeing to participate in an experimental clinical trial to find new treatments for his disease, he finds himself in a completely different body--that of a girl his age, Jacqueline, who defies the expectations of her era.
Julie Otsuka
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
Purchase on Amazon ($10)
Isabel Wilkerson
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.
Purchase on Amazon ($15)
James Baldwin
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today.
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Audre Lorde
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.
Purchase on Amazon ($15)
