Cultural & Regional

Alana Valentine’s mother, Janice, was remarried in 1969 at the Wayside Chapel, run by the charismatic and controversial minister Ted Noffs and his wife Margaret. Many years after her mother died, Alana found the wedding photo, and the longing to speak to her mother about that day drove her to seek out others who had begun new chapters of their lives at Wayside.

In these nine essays, Susan Lieberman is exploring The Country of Old, in which she finds herself a new immigrant. She examines the difficulties of leaving "that other place" and making sense of this new country. Lieberman's touch is light but her analysis of the challenges/opportunities of aging is provocative. "If we are not old, then we are dead," she notes. And if we are, indeed, not dead then how can we live well in this moment in our life span?

In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the formative years which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. In poignant and moving prose we learn about her relationships with her family, her traumatic experience of female genital mutilation at seven years old and escaping suitors at ten and her journey from the rural Egyptian village of her birth to metropolitan Cairo to study medicine.

In Walking through Fire, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the later years of a life which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. Covering her life in Nasser’s then Sadat’s and Mubarak’s Egypt, we learn about Saadawi’s experience of marriage and motherhood, and we travel with her into exile after her life was threatened by religious extremists. Filled with warmth as well as critical reflection, this book reveals the later years of a remarkable life dedicated to the fight for justice and equality.

In 2021, Texas Country Reporter celebrates its fiftieth season on the air. Broadcast every week on stations across Texas, it focuses on "ordinary people doing extraordinary things." In this memoir, Phillips tells his own story, from his early days as a reporter and his initial pitch for the show while a student at SMU to his ongoing work at the longest-running independently produced television show in American television history.

These are the exotic, funny and sometimes bittersweet family stories and photos of an overseas childhood told by the daughter of a State Department diplomat about her family's travels and experiences living overseas from 1957 to 1972. She and her six brothers spent their childhoods in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Ethiopia. Through her stories, the listener can begin to appreciate the adaptability of children to other cultures and the fortitude and courage of parents trying to raise their children to be good citizens of the world as well as good Americans.

Almost every Latina has heard the phrase calladita te ves más bonita—you look most beautiful when you are silent. It's a message rooted in machismo passed from generation to generation, and one that poet and Latine therapist, Kim Guerra, grew up on. In Badass Bonita, Guerra tells a story of coming into her own power, and guides listeners through the process of finding their own. Rejecting what she was taught as a girl, she learned to use her voice and the more she listened to that inner niña, the more she unearthed her inner guerrera.

On the streets of every city a true life battle between revenge and justice is fought. Marginalized communities caught in the crossfire of violence, poverty, drugs, and abuse, seem to spiral. To those on the outside, it is too easily brushed off and judged as just the way things are. To those on the inside, what happens stems from a fight for survival, a longing for family stability, and is a reflection of all they’ve ever known. Author Iran Nazario has lived this. Beaten and abused as a child, witnessing and experiencing things no child should, he was forced to grow up too fast.

Join author Gözde Yücel on an enthralling odyssey that transcends borders, love, and the profound depths of personal transformation. This poignant memoir delves into the life of a Turkish-American woman, a resilient soul whose story resonates with the heartaches and triumphs of immigrants and those navigating the challenging terrain of divorce.

Based on more than a decade of archival research and interviews with dozens of surviving friends and colleagues of Rustin's, Lost Prophet is a triumph. Rustin emerges as a hero of the black freedom struggle and a singularly important figure in the lost gay history of the mid-20th century. John D'Emilio's compelling narrative rescues a forgotten figure and brings alive a time of great hope and great tragedy in the not-so-distant past.