I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

Join a group of enthusiastic readers to discuss great memoirs of significance to the broad field education! Our second Book Club choice for the Spring Semester is Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward (New York : Bloomsbury, 2013). This memoir that examines rural poverty and the lingering strains of racism in the South by the author of Salvage the Bones, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); Sing, Unburied, Sing (New York: Scribner, 2017); and Let Us Descend (New York : Scribner, 2023).

“In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth-and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.” — publisher’s description

Book Club is co-sponsored by the Graduate Writing Center. It meets once a month throughout the semester, with a program for three memoirs, and is open to all students and staff. The first eight people to rsvp will receive a free copy.

Where: 305 Russell