Winner Multicultural Nonfiction 2021 Best Book Awards
The Properties of Perpetual Light is an homage to the work of the activist-writer, which author Julian Aguon describes as ''the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the questions of one's day, telling children the truth.'' With prose and poetry both bracing and quiet, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary. Throughout the book, Aguon grapples with one heart-breaking loss after another by immersing himself in the beauty of his island, the magic of Micronesia, and the wisdom of his favorite books and elders.
Finalist Multicultural Nonfiction 2021 Best Book Awards
Following Mao's call to the young during the Cultural Revolution, Cheng Wang, a so-called “Educated Youth,” boarded a train destined for a secluded village in Inner Mongolia for the compulsory period of re-education. For the next three grueling years in rural exile, he pondered how his once privileged family had been caught in a political undertow, and how his own future might unfold.
From Tea to Coffee is a story of struggle and triumph during China’s modern-day cultural and political drama, and is a rare and personal account that showcases the Chinese national psyche. Like all political movements of the past, the Cultural Revolution was not the first of its kind, nor quite possibly the last, yet Cheng Wang, now at home in both America and in China, maintains an optimism in confronting today's social polarization between the East and the West.
Finalist Multicultural Nonfiction 2021 Best Book Awards
In her award-winning book, NYU Professor & Author Dr Maha Hosain Aziz predicts the world will be defined by a unique global legitimacy crisis in the coming years. Norms in geopolitics, politics, economics and society will continue to be challenged, yet there will be no consensus. If it is not a US-led world anymore, who's in charge of the international system? If democracy is weakening, is there a better system to replace it? If globalization is failing some, is populism the answer? If liberal values are in decline, will xenophobia dominate? Dr Aziz argues that tech has already worsened all aspects of this unique global legitimacy crisis. But she also offers hope that in the future tech can be creatively leveraged to be part of the cure.
Finalist Multicultural Nonfiction 2021 Best Book Awards
When military spouses say "I do" to their service members, they are often clueless about the military lifestyle that lies ahead-specifically, raising a family while the service member deploys several weeks, months, and years throughout their career.
Growing Your Family is a raw testimony of how one immigrant military spouse and ambitious career woman is raising her family with grit, grace, and style. Sharing her extraordinary experience in creating her home from the scratch and with nothing, saying countless tearful goodbyes with young children, and helping her military family thrive in the COVID-19 pandemic, Pearl provides rare gems of wisdom and her unadulterated perspective on how to make the military lifestyle work. This seasoned childcare professional's humor will keep you hooked and laughing aloud as you follow Pearl to unknown corners of Ghana in Africa, to the exotic culture in Japan, and to the sophisticated lifestyle in the US.
Growing Your Family offers priceless guidance and heart-to-heart encouragement to the clueless or tired military spouse.
Finalist Multicultural Nonfiction 2021 Best Book Awards
In June 2020, when the world saw the unrest in America because of centuries of systemic racism, my phone/inbox/email account started to blow up. I began to evaluate why I was the object of these requests. I realized that I am the “magical unicorn”. I am that one black friend they feel comfortable asking these things. I even began to wonder whether those asking me these questions, knew the experiences that caused me to be able to respond without offending, with compassion, and with specific examples. My ability to respond to questions that just happened to occur to you, is a result of my lived experiences over the past 46 years. My ability to smile as you comment with surprise about my responses, “Oh wow, you answered that so well,” or “You were so kind in your response,” is a fine-tuned skill – that of a magical unicorn. It takes skill to explain oppression, that was in fact perpetrated by you (as in a collective “you”) without causing you (as an individual) to feel bad about said oppression. I hope the lessons I share will help move the racial equity conversation in a positive direction, because, I am that one black friend, sharing lessons from a magical unicorn.
Finalist Multicultural Nonfiction 2021 Best Book Awards
OURstory Unchained and Liberated from HIStory is a historical narrative that researches the lives and legacies of the slave ancestors of the first African American dean hired at Clemson University, uncovering unsuspecting ties between John C. Calhoun, owner of Fort Hill plantation (now Clemson University) and John Myers Felder, the largest Felder slave holder in South Carolina. Movement of Felder slaves from South Carolina to Mississippi, then Louisiana, and finally Texas reflects the location of the Felder freedmen post slavery, and patterns of civic and personal activity of the freedmen are likewise similar to that seen in the white families presumably associated with these men and women who survived the ordeal of enslavement.
Finalist Multicultural Nonfiction 2021 Best Book Awards
A founding author of Our Bodies, Ourselves—the bestselling classic on women’s health and sexuality—Wendy Sanford has turned her probing mind to her own life as a white woman in today’s world of race and class inequities. Sanford tells a story, at once profoundly intimate and powerfully political, of her sixty-five year friendship with Mary Norman, whom she met as a Black domestic worker in her privileged white family when both were in their teens. Sanford comes of age within the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Reading deeply in classic works by African-American writers, she begins to reckon with the impact of her training in “the habits of dominance” and her white skin privilege, to see Ms. Norman more fully and to become a more dependable friend.
"Finally, a story from a white woman raised with 'help' who interrogates the relationship’s complexities. As Wendy looks inwards to examine her socialization into a racial hierarchy, and strives to break from her inherited role in order to step differently into a potential friendship with Mary, I found myself gripped by the overwhelming forces working against both of them. Their mutual love and courage to choose differently again and again renders a tender, honest, cringeworthy, and powerful read." —Debby Irving, author of Waking Up White
