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Books for your personal social justice journey

This guide was created as a companion for the Hoodies & Books event on Pace's New York City campus on February 26, 2025.

Self-expression through poetry, memoir, fiction and drama

Cover of the book Notes from a Young Black Chef

Notes from a Young Black Chef: a memoir

Beekman Library Popular Collection
POP ONW 2020
 

Summary: As a boy Onwuachi was sent from the Bronx to rural Nigeria by his mother to 'learn respect.' Through food, he broke out of a dangerous downward spiral and embarked on a new beginning at the bottom of the culinary food chain before going on to train in the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country and appearing as a contestant on Top Chef. His love of food and cooking was a constant, even when the road to success was riddled with potholes. Here he shares the pursuit of his passions, despite the odds. Each chapter includes one recipe.

Cover of the book Bodega Dreams

Bodega Dreams

Beekman Library Stacks
PS3567.U3618 L3 2000

Summary: The word is out in Spanish Harlem: Willy Bodega is king.  Need college tuition for your daughter?  Start-up funds for your fruit stand?  Bodega can help.  He gives everyone a leg up, in exchange only for loyalty--and a steady income from the drugs he pushes.Lyric, inspired, and darkly funny, this powerful debut novel brilliantly evokes the trial of Chino, a smart, promising young man to whom Bodega turns for a favor.

Cover of the book Sag Harbor

Sag Harbor: a novel

Beekman Library Stacks
PS3573.H4768 S35 2010

Summary: Benji, one of the only black kids at an elite prep school in Manhattan, tries desperately to fit in, but every summer, he and his brother, Reggie, escape to the East End of Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals has built a world of its own.

Cover of the book Three Plays by August Wilson

Three Plays by August Wilson

Beekman Library Stacks
PS3573.I45677 A6 1991
 
Contains three plays about twentieth century African-American lives: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

Cover of the book Street freak : money and madness at Lehman Brothers : a memoir

Street freak : money and madness at Lehman Brothers : a memoir

Beekman Library Stacks
HG4910 .D535 2011
 

Summary: A former trader recounts the final years of Lehman Brothers, discussing the outrageous personalities of his co-workers, his own battles with mental illness, and the company's activities during the economic collapse.

Cover of the book The White Boy Shuffle

The White Boy Shuffle

Beekman Library Stacks
PS3552.E19 W45 1996
 
From Goodreads: White Boy Shuffle is Man Booker-winner Paul Beatty’s electrifying debut novel about teenage-surf-bum Gunnar Kaufman who is forced to wise up when his mother moves from suburban Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighbourhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a ‘divided, downtrodden people’. A bombastic coming-of-age novel that has the uncanny ability to make readers want to laugh and cry at the same time,Beatty mingles horrific reality with wild fancy in this outlandish, laugh-out-loud funny and poignant vision of contemporary America.

Cover of the book Interior Chinatown

Interior Chinatown

Beekman Library Popular Collection
POP Yu 2020

From the publisher: From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Cover of the book Choir Boy

Choir boy

Available as an ebook or in print

Beekman LIbrary Plays

PS3613.C38625 C48 2015

A play by Tarell Alvin McCRaney. The Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys is dedicated to the creation of strong, ethical black men. Pharus wants nothing more than to take his rightful place as leader of the school's legendary gospel choir, but can he find his way inside the hallowed halls of this institution if he sings in his own key? Known for his unique brand of urban lyricism,  Tarell Alvin McCRaney follows up his acclaimed trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays with this affecting portrait of a gay youth trying to find the courage to let the truth about himself be known. Set against the sorrowful sounds of hymns and spirituals, Choir Boy premiered at the Royal Court in London before receiving its Off-Broadway premiere in summer 2013 to critical and popular acclaim.

Cover of the book Disability Visability

Disability visibility : first-person stories from the twenty-first century

Available as an ebook for request from the Mortola Library

Summary: A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience... Taken together, this anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own assumptions and understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and past with hope and love.

Cover of the book Octavia's brood : science fiction stories from social justice movements

Octavia's brood : science fiction stories from social justice movements

Available in print and ebook

Beekman Library Popular Collection
POP IMA 2015
 
Summary: Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing visionary  fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. This book brings twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres--sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism--but all are united by an attempt to experiment with new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be.

Cover of the book Gender Queer: a memoir

Gender Queer: a memoir

Beekman Library Popular Collection
POP KOB 2019

 

From the publisher: In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em.... Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Cover of the book Postmodern American poetry : a Norton anthology

Postmodern American poetry : a Norton anthology

Beekman Library Stacks
PS615 .P669 1994
 
A survey of major poets and movements of American postmodern poetry includes more than four hundred poems by 103 poets.
 
 
 

Cover of the book Collected Essays by James Baldwin

Collected Essays by James Baldwin

Beekman Library Stacks
PS3552.A45 A16 1998
 
From the publisher: This book offers a comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction works that articulate issues of race, democracy, and American identity. His landmark collections Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name fuse the personal, literary, and the political. The classic The Fire Next Time provides an analysis of America's racial divide and No Name in The Street and The Devil Finds Work chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era. Thirty-six additional essays record insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the music of Earl Hines, and more.

Cover of the book Hunger: a memoir of (my) body

Hunger: a memoir of (my) body

Beekman Library Stacks
BF697.5.B63 G39 2017
 
From the publisher: New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health...With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.

Cover of the book The Poem Is You

The poem is you : 60 contemporary American poems and how to read them

Mortola LibraryStacks
 
PS325 .B87 2016
 
The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture...intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.