It Takes a Network

Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change – Reflections on Burnout, Trauma, and Building Communities of Care in Social Justice Work
(North Atlantic Books)

Fighting for social justice is round-the-clock work. In their new book, Tessa Hicks Peterson and co-editor Hala Khouri have assembled a collection of essays that offer a practical, insightful look at the toll of collective justice work. Activists and organizers are just as susceptible to burnout or toxicity as workers in other organizations. The essays address many of these challenges and underscore the importance of embodying healing; celebrating creativity and radical imagination; honoring the need for self-care and disrupting racist, classist, antiqueer, and antitrans behavior and systems. The editors and their contributors hope the book will provide a blueprint for building a collective justice model based on “resilience, joy, and community care.”  Hicks Peterson and Khouri have also produced an accompanying workbook, Practicing Liberation: Radical Tools for Grassroots Activists, Community Leaders, Teachers, and Caretakers Working Toward Social Justice, to make that blueprint even more achievable. 
 

The Place Collaboratory: Higher Education, Community Engagement, and the Public Humanities
(E-Book)

The PLACE Collaboratory (Partnerships for Listening and Action by Communities and Educators) was a network of eight projects in four cities focused on humanities-based civic engagement and included 12 academic institutions and more than 20 community partners. It existed from 2019 to 2023 and utilized students as key co-creators and leaders. This multi-media digital book provides an overview of the network's projects and partners and what it accomplished in its four years. That overview features a contribution from Pitzer Professor Tessa Hicks Peterson, who describes the work done by CASA Pitzer (Hicks Peterson is the director) along with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective. 

 

What Work Means: Beyong the Puritan Work Ethic
(Cornell University Press)

Dispelling the idea of Americans as workaholics, Claudia Strauss, a professor of anthropology at Pitzer, presents a more nuanced perspective in her new book. Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life. In addition, What Work Means provides a platform for a discussion of the possible meaning of work as it changes because of the increasing dominance of teleworking, greater automation, and more atypical forms of employment. 


 


 

 

Drawing Processes of Life: Molecules, Cells, Organisms
(University of Chicago Press)

The insights of Pitzer Associate Professor of Art Sarah Gilbert featured in this book address the challenge of depicting biological systems and how artistic evocations can generate productive questions for artists and scientists. If you’re an artist who is sketching the process of cell division, for example, what’s the best way to do that? This book considers such questions with the help of Gilbert and other scholars in the humanities and life sciences. The result is a rich variety of topics, including epigenetics, epistemology, and metamorphosis in insects, proteins, and other ever-shifting biological systems.  






 

All That I'm Allowed
(Bamboo Dart Press)

Like many of the best children’s books, All That I’m Allowed does double duty as a storybook for grownups about learning to live with children and dogs. Ellen Harper ’87 gently reminds moms and dads that their parenting lessons are often interpreted differently than they intended. All That I’m Allowed is a make-believe romp through the poignant and often funny misinterpretations that children make as well as a social commentary on coming to grips with a rapidly changing society and how we attempt to make sense of it all.



 

Introduction to Contemporary Special Education: New Horizons, Third Edition
(Pearson)

Deborah Deutsch Smith ’68 and her co-authors present evidence-based practices, data, and research on special education and balance this material with real stories about real people. Current, accurate, and personal, this unique text sets educators who are engaged and passionate about their work and value each student on the best path forward using validated practices. This new edition also puts the spotlight on the impact of role models, diversity, and equity while incorporating the latest information about evidence-based practices, inclusive settings, and assisting exceptional learners. 

 
 

Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms, Third Edition
(Sage Publications, Inc.)

Along with the special education new edition included in this roundup, Deborah Deutsch Smith ’68 also serves as a co-editor and contributor to an essential work that uses the ADAPT framework (ask, determine, analyze, propose, test) to help teachers determine how to use proven academic and behavioral interventions to obtain the best outcomes for students with disabilities. Smith, Diane P. Bryant, and Brian R. Bryant show how to create truly inclusive classrooms for students with disabilities. This third edition also features reorganized chapters on individualized services and diverse learners, new information on the latest court cases, and revised sections about disabilities.


 

La Sirena: A Novella in Verse
(Cloudbank Books)

Maurya Simon’s ’80 11th volume of poetry, La Sirena, is a poignant retelling of “The Little Mermaid” that critic W.J. Herbert in MER Journal calls “a vibrant contribution to feminist recastings of myth and fairytale.” Simon’s story of the magical Pacific Ocean and a young girl’s coming of age, according to fellow poet Amy Gerstler ’78, is “a truly fresh take on mermaid myths drawn from across cultures, hybridizing and unifying them into a vivid tale for our time.” A recipient of the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Booksellers Association, Simon is a 2024 National Book Award in Poetry nominee for La Sirena. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in an array of literary journals and included in several national multimedia exhibits and performances.  


 


 

Not Far From Here
(Candlewick Press)

In her debut book, Nydia Armendia-Sánchez ’02 (with help from award-winning illustrator Devon Holzwarth) has crafted a bilingual ode to the love, courage, and memories we carry from one generation to the next and from one country to another. She lovingly relays a story of immigration, creativity, and comunidad through a translanguage text that moves naturally from English to Español and back in a manner that will be familiar to many second- and third-generation Latine families—and evocative to immigrant families of any heritage. Young People’s Poet Laureate Emerita Margarita Engle (author of the Newbery Honor Book, The Surrender Tree) hails Armendia-Sánchez’ book as a “lovely tribute to immigrants and creativity.” 

Tiger Chair: A Short Story
(Amazon Original Stories)

Max Brooks ’94 (son of Mel and bestselling author of World War Z) has followed his zombie apocalypse with a gripping short story about guerrilla warfare exploding on the streets of Los Angeles after a Chinese invasion of the U.S. West Coast. Years into the war, the insurgency escalates but the propaganda never changes. Torn between loyalty to his country and loyalty to his troops, a Chinese officer writes a brutally honest—and possibly suicidal—letter home to unmask the truth. In his epistolary approach to this scenario, Brooks combines his signature meticulous research with unforgettable characters to create a landmark work of speculative fiction. 

Statistics for Economists
(World Scientific Publishing Co. PTE Ltd.) 

Pitzer Economics Professor Linus Yamane has written a book about statistics that is made to order for undergraduate students. Among the dozens of statistics textbooks extant, most are written at a level that is either too complicated or too basic, which makes you wonder who will actually benefit from using them. In Yamane’s case, his new textbook quickly gets to the major points of statistics used by economists with a mixture of concision and accessibility that is sure to appeal to students at all levels.