Elizabeth Acevedo

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. 

Novel in poetic verse

Ray Bradbury

After learning that books are a vital part of a culture he never knew, a book-burning official in a future fascist state clandestinely pursues reading until he is betrayed. 

Fiction

Tahereh Mafi

It's 2002, a year after 9/11. It's an extremely turbulent time politically, but especially so for someone like Shirin, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl who's tired of being stereotyped. Then she meets Ocean James. He's the first person in forever who really seems to want to get to know Shirin. 

Fiction

Wes Moore

Wes Moore discusses how he met and interviewed another man also named Wes Moore who followed a very different and destructive life than his own, even though they grew up close to one another in the same dangerous neighborhood. Moore outlines the life decisions that led each of them in different directions. 

Nonfiction

Sylvia Plath

IThe Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic .

Fiction

Erich Maria Remarque

In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches. 

Fiction

Hidden Figures tells the incredible real-life account of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden—who, in a time when black women faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles, went to work as “calculators” at NASA. With pencils, paper, and slide rules, they transformed airplane, rocket, and satellite designs—and ensured a World War II victory.

Nonfiction

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A harrowing novel about life in a Stalinist labor camp in Siberia. Recounts the experiences of Sukhanov, a prisoner at a Soviet work camp in Siberia as he struggles for survival. 

Fiction

Angie Thomas

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend. 

Fiction

Ibi Zoboi, Yusef Salaam

Even though Amal Shahid is an artist and poet, he's still viewed as disruptive and unmotivated at his diverse art school. One fateful night at a local park, a fight breaks out and Amal is sent to prison. His despair and rage at having his bright future destroyed threaten to overcome him until he discovers the refuge and hope that his words and art give him. 

Novel in poetic verse