Previous Common Read Selections
More Than a Decade of Shared Reading
The Common Read program has brought students, faculty and staff together around a single book each year since 2011. Each selection invites campus-wide conversation on important contemporary issues.
Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of A Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad (2023-24)
A memoir of illness, a narrative of the making and remaking of intimacies and relationships, an exploration of how heartbreak and illness produce writing and art, and the tale of a road trip across the U.S.
I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib (2022-23)
The autobiographical story of Gharib’s struggles through childhood, youth, and early adulthood to come to terms with her bi-ethnic identity, as the child of immigrants, a Catholic Filipina mother and Muslim Egyptian father, and life in the United States.
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham (2021-22)
A lyrical tribute to the natural world: its beauty, resilience, and diversity. Drawing on the history of his African American family, rooted in the soil and woods of South Carolina, Lanham reflects on the development of selfhood and his intimate connection to and love of place.
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli (2020-21)
Luiselli, a prominent writer and MacArthur Fellow, drew on her experience as an interpreter for unaccompanied refugee children in New York City immigration courts for her essay. Prompted by the intake questions, Luiselli reflects on the border, family and childhood, community, national identity and belonging, and language itself.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2019-20)
A moving novel focused on a quest for family and love in the dangerously racist and deeply impoverished fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Ward is a MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2018-19)
Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book reports on major human-induced challenges facing natural life across the planet.
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (2017-18)
A novel of displacement and relocation that speaks to people’s movements across cultural and political borders in the contemporary world, it begins in a Zimbabwean shantytown, is narrated in the remarkable voice of a young girl, Darling, and ends in Detroit and Kalamazoo, Michigan. Edwidge Danticat, novelist, essayist, and our inaugural Common Read author, describes it as “an exquisite and powerful first novel, filled with an equal measure of beauty and horror and laughter and pain.”
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016-17)
Written as a letter to his son, Coates explores what it means to be black in America. This National Book Award winner also appeared on many best-of-the-year lists when it was published in 2015.
Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean (2015-16)
Published in 1994, the book is widely heralded as a profound reflection on capital punishment and has also been the basis for a film and an opera. The memoir speaks to issues of capital punishment, the criminal justice system, the humanity of perpetrators, and the claims and needs of direct and indirect victims of brutal crimes.
Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America by Jonathan Kozol (2014-15)
This book revisits the children and families about whom Kozol has written in earlier works. Some of the stories are about defeat and the inability to overcome almost impossible odds. Others are accounts of resilience, determination, and creativity, of children emerging whole and full of life.
The Submission by Amy Waldman (2013-14)
Set in New York City, this novel is about perspectives and tensions in the wake of 9/11. It raises broad questions about identity, respect, and belonging; uses of public space and the nature of art; and the behaviors of politicians and the media. It particularly explores Muslim-American identities and experiences after 2001.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2012)
This widely reviewed and praised work of non-fiction focuses on the history of both U.S. medical research and one multi-generational African-American family. Skloot visited UM-Flint as part of the Common Read in the Fall.
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (2011)
The University of Michigan-Flint inaugurated the Common Read program in Fall 2011 with Edwidge Danticat’s “Brother, I’m Dying,” her 2007 memoir that bridges Haiti and the United States and demonstrates the power of words to recreate worlds of both suffering and love. Ms. Danticat visited the UM-Flint campus on March 13, 2012. During her time at UM-Flint, she participated in a writing seminar with faculty and students and delivered a public presentation on her book.