A narrative history of the Great Migration, tracing the movement of Black Americans out of the U.S. South into northern, midwestern, and western cities across much of the twentieth century.

Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is a verse memoir that records her early childhood and adolescent memories growing up African American in the 1960s.

Two linked essays presented as letters that question the place of race and religion in American life.

A critique of prevailing mid-20th-century urban planning that argues neighborhoods thrive when everyday street life, local commerce, and diverse uses are preserved.

A first-person memoir recounting the author's migration from El Salvador to the United States as a child. The narrative follows the physical and emotional journey, the dangers and practical hurdles of traveling undocumented, and the ongoing effects of displacement on family and identity.

A memoir of a childhood spent in unstable, often impoverished circumstances, told from the author's adult vantage. The account focuses on a family marked by vivid highs and dangerous lows: parental idealism and promises alongside episodes of neglect and homelessness.

This nonfiction work surveys evidence for complex learning, problem-solving, and memory in birds by following field observations and laboratory studies across species.

A linked memoir of personal and communal loss: the author recounts the deaths of five Black men connected to her across roughly four years and situates those deaths within family history, local conditions, and systemic forces.

A first-person account of the year after Joan Didion's husband died, recording the small, persistent thoughts and rituals that accompany sudden bereavement. The narrative tracks how memory, habit, and formal thinking shape a surviving spouse’s attempt to understand loss and the quotidian aftermath of grief.