Nonfiction Backlist Gems

When Shawna Rodenberg was a kid, her dad moved her and their entire family to Minnesota to join a commune of people dedicated to their end-of-days focused extreme religious group. After several difficult years with the group, Shawna and her family returned to Kentucky. This memoir focuses on family and her heritage as a Kentuckian. It’s also a coming-of-age story for a woman growing up in the ’70s and ’80s.

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo follows her memoir Crazy Brave with her new memoir Poet Warrior. It depicts her life as a Muscogee Creek woman always listening to the stories of her elders and other community members. She emphasizes that she is a person who is always learning, and that thirst for knowledge shows up in her poetry again and again.

I had never read Annie Dillard before, so I thought this short book of essays would be a great place to start. Dillard possesses the ability to capture ideas in such beautiful ways. She’ll start talking about forming sentences and how long she feels that it takes, and I find myself completely engrossed with how she spent her afternoon. If you love books about writers and writing, then you will absolutely love this book.

The editor of Disability Visibility, an incredible disability anthology, is back with a memoir of her life. The book is structured like a scrapbook, including photos, transcripts, drawings, and so much more. It makes the reading experience feel incredibly interactive. Alice Wong has long fought for disability rights in the United States and has helped so many disabled people tell their stories. Now, she’s telling her own story.

In this graphic memoir, Kate Beaton describes her experience heading west during Alberta’s oil rush in hopes of making money and giving herself a better start in life. Originally from Cape Breton, Beaton finds herself in a whole new world. Beaton always considered that being Canadian meant caring for the world around you, including the natural world. But working in oil production, she realizes that her Canadian identity might be more complex than she realized.