William Melvin Kelley is awarded the American Book Award for DUNFORDS TRAVELS EVERYWHERES

William Melvin Kelley and illustrator Aiki Kelley are being awarded the American Book Award for Dunfords Travels Everywheres, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.   “Among the most innovative and exciting novelists in the history of international literature, the

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Carolyn Forché is awarded the American Book Award for In the Lateness of the World

Carolyn Forché is being awarded the American Book Award for In the Lateness of the World, a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination

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Higher Education Must Be Decolonized Through Study and Struggle: A Q&A With Leigh Patel, author of No Study Without Struggle

  An inconvenient truth lies beneath the promises of opportunity and prestige that higher education degrees offer. US academic institutions are built upon legacies of stolen labor on stolen land. Through history, this settler-colonial foundation has trapped us in history and perpetuated race, class, and gender inequalities on campus. Social protests, often led by youth,

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Columbia University Psychologist Lisa Miller on Cultivating Students’ Academic and Inner Lives

Contributed by Lisa Miller, PhD, author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life As an undergraduate psychology major at Yale, I always sat in the front row so that I might study not only the material but my professor as well. Like many students who sign

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U.S. News & World Report Recommends 9 Penguin Random House Titles in Their List of “10 Books to Read Before College”

U.S. News & World Report, which publishes the most widely quoted annual set of rankings for American colleges and universities, recently shared their list of “10 Books to Read Before College.” Describing these books as “assigned texts [that] are regularly used in freshman-level classes and offer students a chance to come together to discuss a

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Women Climate Leaders Provide Truth, Courage, and Solutions in All We Can Save

Contributed by Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis “I was shaking as I read the opening essay because I felt so empowered,” one of my students shared at the start of the fall 2020 semester. I’d spent the previous nine months co-editing the bestselling

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Anthony DePalma on THE CUBANS: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times

Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, THE CUBANS, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous

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