Inclusive Collection: T

"A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love."

Fiction. "In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more than three decades."

"From disability advocate with a PhD in disability studies and creative nonfiction, and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty, an essay collection based on a lifetime of experiences in a paralyzed body, tackling themes of identity, accessibility, bodies, and representation."

Fiction. "Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends--some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community."

"Activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that the new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation."

Fiction. "Raina wakes up one night with a terrible upset stomach. Her mom has one, too, so it's probably just a bug. Raina eventually returns to school, where she's dealing with the usual highs and lows: friends, not-friends, and classmates who think the school year is just one long gross-out session. It soon becomes clear that Raina's tummy trouble isn't going away ... and it coincides with her worries about food, school, and changing friendships. What's going on?"

Study of late twentieth and early twenty-first genre fiction by female-identified Asian American authors featuring Asian American characters which also "contribute critically to public dialogue about national belonging."

"The author recalls his early experiences with poverty and discrimination, his involvement with drugs and gangs, and his prison sentence for armed robbery which led to his rehabilitation and work with street gangs and drug addicts."

Fiction. "Ming's wishes at the tree on Lunar New Year with his grandmother always seemed to come true, but one year the tree does not help, and he alone must make peace with the loss of his grandmother and the spirit of the tree."

Nonfiction. " In this follow-up to his classic coming-out/coming-of-age memoir which he wrote under the pseudonym John Reid, Tobias "tells the next part of his personal story, and the story of a civil rights movement.""

"Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life for his nonfiction and his novels, David Treuer began to uncover a different narrative. Not despite but rather because of American Indians' intense struggles to preserve their tribes, their cultures, and their very existence, the true story has been one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir to explore the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival."

"In this first full-length study, Trinh Minh-ha examines post-colonial processes of displacement -- cultural hybridization and decentered realities, fragmented selves and multiple identities, marginal voices and languages of rupture. Working at the intersection of several fields -- women's studies, anthropology, critical cultural studies, literary criticism, and feminist theory, she juxtaposes numerous prevailing contemporary discourses in a form that questions the (male-is-norm) literary and theoretical establishment."

"This book explores the historical connections among jazz, African American Islam, and black internationalism from the 1940s to the 1970s. It shows that in the post-World War II era through the 1970s, the social justice values that Islam and jazz shared were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. This book argues that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a black-Atlantic cool that shaped both black religion, jazz styles, and black masculinity and femininity during the Cold War and continuing up to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the 1960s."

"From her early years in Nutbush, Tennessee, to her rise to fame alongside Ike Turner, to her phenomenal success in the 1980s and beyond, Tina candidly examines her personal history--her trials, her triumphs, and everything in between. She shares stories from her years working alongside the biggest names in music--Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, David Bowie, Beyoncé--and she writes about unexpectedly meeting the love of her life in 1986 and marrying him twenty-seven years later. As Tina says, 'Sometimes the greatest happiness we know comes just when we are able to appreciate it.'"

"Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty brings a fresh perspective to our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry--both black and white--through food, from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touchpoints in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine."

"Rather than simply engaging in a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement are shunned alike, Disabilities of the Color Line argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed disability as a part of Black social life in varied and complex ways. Sometimes their affirmation of disability serves to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been and are made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and society. Sometimes their assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of commonality and community that comes not only from a recognition of the shared subjection of blackness and disability but also from a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order."

"But what shines most from the memoir is how Tyson’s story, while frankly written and supremely eye-opening, isn’t just her own. It’s also the story of Black women in America, of generations past, present and yet to come, whose wills to survive are divinely gifted and ancestrally guided. Perhaps that’s why, in the last pages of the book, she speaks directly to her proverbial sisters and daughters, nieces and grandchildren, revealing what she hopes her legacy will be, whenever God calls her home."