Wasatch County Library

The author recounts her traumatic childhood, with a mother suffering from mental illness, unfortunate experiences in a series of foster homes, and her discovery of her love of writing, which eventually helped her overcome the hazards of her life.

"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon look her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...

"In 1854, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Jennings, an African American schoolteacher, fought back when she was unjustly denied entry to a New York City streetcar, sparking the beginnings of the long struggle to gain equal rights on public transportation. One hundred years before Rosa Parks took her stand, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Jennings tried to board a streetcar in New York City on her way to church. Though there were plenty of empty seats, she was denied entry,...

A Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award

New York Times Bestseller

A SeattleTimes pick for Summer Reading Roundup 2017

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years.

Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in

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"A promise could betray you. It's 2008, and the rise of Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He's eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to--and abandoned--when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she'd never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make...

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.  ("You have to read them.")
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then...

"A dramatic story of a freed slave who has lost her husband and her freedom papers and must find a way to survive in the wilderness of the Oregon Territory"--

Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired  countless readers with the first three volumes of  her autobiography, one of the most remarkable  personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth  volume, The Heart of a Woman, her  turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the  singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous  New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers...

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the...

"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...