The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott. Knopf, 2016. A chronicle of the friendship between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Pauli Murray: granddaughter of a mixed-race slave, lawyer, civil rights activist, minister, and co-founder of the National Organization of […]
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. HarperCollins, 2016. For August, friendship was everything. It was the 1970s in Brooklyn. She and her three best girlfriends lived confident of their talents, dreaming of the future. But their Brooklyn was a dangerous place, where dreams were fleeting, and growing up female was not easy. Woodson’s latest novel is […]
Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory, 2nd ed. by Qwo-Li Driskill. University of Arizona Press, 2016. Both a brutal history of colonial intrusion on native peoples and a call to action for asegi (strange spirited) indigenous people to reclaim an ancient, non-binary history of sexuality, the author (Cherokee, poet, historian) uses primary documents to […]