Read Woke Books in our Library

What is "Read Woke"?

The #ReadWoke challenge was created in 2017 by Cicely Lewis, a nationally recognized educator and librarian from Georgia.

This is how Lewis defines read woke:

“Read Woke is a feeling, a form of education, a call to action. It means arming yourself with

knowledge to better protect your rights. It’s learning about others so you treat people with

respect and dignity, no matter their religion, race, creed, or color.”

(School Library Journal, April 2020)

These books help to educate, heal, and empower. They deal with issues beyond race such as poverty, body shaming, mental health, and LGBTQ rights.

A Read Woke book should:

Challenge a social norm
Give voice to the voiceless
Provide information about a group that has been disenfranchised
Seek to challenge the status quo
Have a protagonist from an underrepresented or oppressed group

Many of these books are #OwnVoices. OwnVoices is a term coined by the writer Corinne Duyvis, and refers to an author from a marginalized or under-represented group writing about their own experiences/from their own perspective, rather than someone from an outside perspective writing as a character from an underrepresented group.

According to Kayla Whaley of Disability in Kidlit, Own voices is about telling better stories. She explains:

Even when portrayals of diverse characters by majority-group authors are respectfully and

accurately done, there’s an extra degree of nuance and authority that comes with writing from

lived experience. Those books that are #OwnVoices have an added richness to them precisely because

the author shares an identity with the character. The author has the deepest possible understanding

of the intricacies, the joys, the difficulties, the pride, the frustration, and every other possible facet of

that particular life — because the author has actually lived it.

Including books from ReadWoke and OwnVoices adds diversity to our collection. It offers mirrors by which students can see themselves and windows to see the diversity of human experience. These books help promote empathy, understanding and self-confidence in readers.