The Pauli Murray Center book club is a monthly meeting where activists, creatives, and book lovers come together to explore a book or set of selections. The selected books, essays, videos, or interviews highlight LGBTQ+ and Black/Indigenous/People of Color authors and span genres.
Upcoming Book Club Events
January 2024 - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Center will restart the monthly book club this January! This month, we'll meet on January 31st virtually at 6:00 PM with two co-facilitators. Visit your local library or bookstore to grab a copy! Sign up below to receive the Zoom link.
Summary: As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
Past Book Club Events
January 2022 - Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da'Shaun Harrison
February 2022 - Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
March 2022 - They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (Pages 1-100)
April 2022 - They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (Pages 101-205)
May 2022 - The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
October 2022 - Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement by Tarana Burke and Dust Bunnies and Sparrows: A Poetic Liberation From/through Domestic Violence by Kimberly Gaubault (McCrae)
November 2022 - a selection of sermons and faith-related essays written by the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, available as PDFs.
December 2022 - Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
January 2023 - We Are Not Like Them By: Christine Pride and Jo Piazza
February 2023 - Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
March 2023 - Selected Chapters of At The Dark End of the Street By Danielle McGuire or YouTube Video
April 2023 - Emergent Strategy By: adrienne maree brown
May 2023 - The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
June 2023 - Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn