Staff Picks

Dungy, a CSU professor and poet, writes about the flower garden and native prairie space at her home in Fort Collins. Dungy, who is African American, shares stories along with the scientific names of her plants. A chapter might begin with rabbits living in her yard, then shift to the history of how plants and seeds arrived with Africans who survived the Middle Passage to be sold into slavery. She weaves modern events with family history and historical research about the United States.

 

Publisher’s description
Poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Find Soil  in our online catalog

Beautifully written and so interesting, this exploration of muscle (both physical and metaphorical) weaves together the clinical, the cultural, and the personal to describe our relationship with "the stuff that moves us." It will make you fall back in love with your own body in motion--and inspire you through the stories of others fully living that relationship.

 

Publisher’s description:

Cardiac, smooth, skeletal--these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty--and how they have distorted it--through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.

 

How far will greed take people? And when this greed threatens a community's survival, how far will locals go to save themselves? These questions are central to Imbolo Mbue's sophomore novel. The deep character studies and lyrical writing encourage emotional investment, while the Greek chorus creates an eerie undertone. The narrative highlights the complicated nature of resistance in the face of seemingly unending violence. This beautifully written book leaves a lasting impact.

 

Publisher's description:
'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the villagers are made--and ignored. The country's government, led by a corrupt, brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight the American corporation. Doing so will come at a steep price. Told through multiple perspectives and centered around a fierce young girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghosts of colonialism, comes up against one community's determination to hold on to its ancestral land--and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom.

Find How Beautiful We Were in our online catalog

Abdurraqib's writing is passionate, jumps off the page at times, and has rhythm and meaning for every word and at the corners of every sentence. He articulates what it means to be a true fan, how that fandom is intertwined with the city you're from, and how a lot of times that city lets you down but you keep showing up, because you've always dreamed of the day your team, your city, can rise above it and get national recognition for redemption, even if it's just for that moment.

 

Publisher's description: 

While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role-models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir: "Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.

 

A luminous and lyrical account of the life of Harriet Tubman. Night Flyer draws from spiritual biographies in the late 1800s, reflections on Tubman’s ecological awareness of the natural world and the imperfect sources we have from those who interviewed her in old age. The portrait that emerges attempts to grasp so many mysteries and complexities of Tubman’s life—from her faith, mysticism, and dreams, to her family relationships. A powerful and riveting read and a finalist for a NBCC Award.

 

Publisher's description:
From the National-Book-Award-winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand. Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born, and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she's a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero-the woman who, despite being barely five-feet tall, illiterate, and suffering from a brain injury, managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others North to freedom, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some 750 people without loss of life. You could almost say she's America's Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles's extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman's life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes the more palpable the more we understand it-a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.

Find Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People in our online catalog

Kimmerle explores the investigation that inspired Colson Whitehead's novel The Nickel Boys in this challenging read. However, Kimmerle also shows that there are those who are committed to preserving history, including the bad.

 

Publisher description:

Recounts the story of the Dozier School, a Florida reform school shut down in 2011 due to reports of cruelty, abuse, and mysterious deaths, and the efforts of the author, a leading forensic anthropologist, to locate and exhume the graves of the boys buried there in order to reunite them with their families.

 

Reynolds explores "the rules" that have been passed down to Will by generations before him: no crying, no snitching, and always get revenge. Written in verse, this work considers the troubling emotions often suppressed in a neighborhood where stoicism is respected and forgiveness is rare. Being immersed in a story about the cycle of violence, Long Way Down fosters empathy for people who have different lived experiences from their own.

 

Publisher's description:
As Will, fifteen, sets out to avenge his brother Shawn's fatal shooting, seven ghosts who knew Shawn board the elevator and reveal truths Will needs to know.

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Nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy award, N.K. Jemisin brings her unique perspective as a Black female author in the Fantasy/Sci-fi space to write one of the most brilliant and immersive books I've ever read.

 

Publisher description:

After Yeine Darr is summoned to the majestic city of Sky and named an heiress to the king of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, she is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had, drawing ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history.

Find The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in our online catalog