LibraryAware November 2025

Recent Releases

Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America
by Jeff Chang

Bruce Lee’s arrival on the big screen was seismic, as recounted here by Asian American author Jeff Chang. Lee leveraged a potent mix of “magnetism and physical talents” (Kirkus Reviews) to gain renown as a martial arts teacher and later as an actor in Hong Kong and Hollywood, soon becoming the original Asian megastar. For fans of: The Golden Screen: The Movies That Made Asian America by Jeff Yang.

Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age
by Joy Harjo

Former United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s latest book is equal parts memoir and inspirational guide addressed to young Native women. Accordingly, her story is imbued with lyricism, spirituality, and a call to embrace one’s creativity even in the face of the pain, despair, and injustice that many young Indigenous people frequently encounter. For another inspiring memoir that incorporates ethnic identity and creativity, try Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu.

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
by Beth Macy

Author Beth Macy tells her life story framed within a recent visit to her hardscrabble Midwestern hometown. Although Macy’s childhood was marked by trauma, she remembers Urbana, Ohio, as a place where neighbors had each other’s backs, a situation since compromised by declining opportunities, opioid addiction, and social polarization. Try this next: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Joyride
by Susan Orlean

Celebrated nonfiction author Susan Orlean chooses her own life as subject in Joyride. Orlean openly reveals her bumpy road through the often challenging life of a professional writer, including her years developing a strong journalistic voice, and as a bonus provides indispensable advice to aspiring writers throughout. For another work-centered memoir from a writer of nonfiction, try Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro.

Focus on: Native American Heritage Month

Postcolonial Love Poem
by Natalie Diaz

Mojave poet Natalie Diaz’s second volume of poetry draws details from her own life as an Indigenous American and spotlights themes and sentiments rooted in the Indigenous experience. Diaz employs sensual images to invoke American imperialism, Indigenous protest, assimilation, and desire, the latter of which she explores in numerous love poems that “buzz with erotic energy” (Booklist). For fans of: the socially aware poetry of Ada Limón.

Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age
by Darrel J. McLeod

A hopeful account of persisting in the face of generational trauma -- McLeod's mother, a survivor of a Catholic residential school, struggled with alcoholism, leaving McLeod to care for himself and his younger siblings.

Did you know? "Mamaskatch" is a Cree word with several meanings, including "How strange" and "It's a miracle."

Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
by Leah Myers

Leah Myers, a Native American writer of mixed ethnicity, writes about embracing her Jamestown S’Klallam heritage as the last member of her family's bloodline using Pacific Northwest Native tradition to create a totem pole of her female ancestors in the form of spirit animals. For another memoir about family history complicated by multiracial identities, read We Take Our Cities with Us by Sorayya Khan.

Apple: (Skin to the Core)
by Eric Gansworth

The term Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside. In APPLE (SKIN TO THE CORE), Eric Gansworth tells his story, the story of his family--of Onondaga among Tuscaroras--of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

Contact your librarian for more great books!